


Fix the Sky a Little

by chiiyo86



Series: Drove Through Ghosts [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Angel & Vessel Interactions, Child Death, Dreams, F/M, M/M, Polyamory, Sea Monsters, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-24
Packaged: 2018-04-05 19:24:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4191957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiiyo86/pseuds/chiiyo86
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once a vessel, always a vessel; this is a truth Claire Novak knows well. When Claire's nights get disturbed by the calls for help of a fallen angel turned human, she, Ben and Jesse have to ally themselves with Castiel and the Winchesters to protect angels who have decided to fall and are now children. One thing they know: beneath the surface of a lake, the Leviathan awaits.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fix the Sky a Little

**Author's Note:**

> The Leviathan depicted in this story is nothing like the Leviathans from season 7 - in fact, most of season 7 didn't happen the way it did in the show. Claire's characterization was elaborated before her recent episodes, so the character in this fic bears little resemblance with the canon character from season 10.
> 
> A million thanks to my friends miramirth and fallingvoices for their hard work as betas, and to my artist [ideare](http://ideare.livejournal.com/)! You can find her art [here](http://amanivuote.livejournal.com/5315.html) \- check it out, and don't forget to leave her comments.

It was probably the screams that woke her up. Claire came to with their echoes in her ears, adrenaline pumping through her veins. Her fingers were clenched in a tight fist, aching with the strain, and she forced herself to relax, to open her hand one finger after another and let the tension go like water flowing out. Whatever dream she’d had, she was now safe in her bed and nothing could touch her. _Breathe in. Let it fill your belly. Breathe out through your mouth._

There was a sound somewhere to her right, a deep sigh, and the bed moved and creaked. Not actually in her bed, then—she was at Ben’s, in his too-narrow bed, and she could feel from the lack of warmth that Ben had rolled away from her and into the empty spot left by Jesse getting up as he did most nights. She now wondered if it was Jesse leaving the room that had woken her up; the screaming must have been in her mind.

Claire pushed herself up in a sitting position, careful not to press too much of her weight down and have the mattress creak again. She knew Ben was likely to wake up at the slightest disturbance, and it would serve no purpose to have all of them miss on their sleep. Ben was already up often enough because of Jesse’s issues.

She found him outside, leaning with his elbows against the railing of the balcony, the tip of his cigarette a bright beacon in the darkness. With the start of April the nights had gotten warmer, but Claire was still cold in her t-shirt and shorts. Jesse was, as always, unabashedly shirtless and probably not even feeling the temperature.

“Hey,” Jesse said softly, not turning around. His fingers were roving over the railing in a movement that was too deliberate to be unconscious; feeling the cracks in the paint, the cool of the metal, the places where it had started to rust. “Did I wake you up?”

She recognized the signs: he was grounding himself, desperately trying to get reality to assert itself to him, not sure if he was actually awake. It meant that she needed to approach him carefully. She settled next to him, her arms crossed over the railing, close but not touching. “No. I had a dream.”

He didn’t ask about her dream, and she knew it was because he didn’t want to encourage questions about his own night terrors. Not that she really needed to ask, as she knew it could only be one of two things: being tortured by demons in Stull Cemetery, or being manipulated by a creature of literal nightmares until he didn’t know reality from dream. Take your pick.

They remained silent for a long while. The two of them didn’t mind silence, unlike Ben who got antsy when no one talked for too long, and Claire found it nice to have someone to be silent with. The night was quiet except for the odd car driving by. One of the streetlamps in the distance kept winking off and on, and Claire wondered if the flickering was down to the lamp malfunctioning or Jesse’s powers slipping out of his control. The metal of the railing was getting warmer under her forearms; smoke from Jesse’s cigarette danced in front of her eyes, rising up to the sky in frayed ribbons; his elbow brushed against hers, then his knee against her leg when he scratched his right calf with his toes. Instead of stubbing out what was left of his cigarette, he crushed it in his hand and it dissolved, not even leaving a dark mark inside his palm.

“Show off,” she said, and he snorted a laugh.

“Wanna make out?”

She lifted an eyebrow. “Out there?”

“No one will see us.”

A hedge of evergreen manzanita trees separated their building from the street, and at this time of the night very few people would even be out to see them.

“You exhibitionist,” she said, but hooked a hand behind his neck to make him bend down to her and kiss her. He smiled against her lips and let her crowd him against the railing. He tasted like tobacco, which was a taste she didn’t like much but could overlook.

Sex was a comfort to him, she knew, and she couldn’t do much else to help him, even if it meant going against her education, which told her that such things were only ever done behind closed doors. She slid down her hand from his neck to the middle of his back, feeling how warm his skin was. She pressed a little more against him, trying to get him to share some of that warmth with her. Hellfire warmth, but it felt good anyway. The taint from his demonic nature surrounded him like a vile cloud, but she had learned to put that sickening feeling aside and focus instead on the soft skin on the inside of his arms, the scratch of his stubble on her cheek, the hot length of his hard-on against her hip.

She wasn’t cold by the time they went back inside. They slid into the bed on both sides of Ben. He reacted to their return by mumbling something indistinct, but didn’t wake up. Claire slept and didn’t dream again until morning.

\---

“Hold the torch that way. No, no, to the right.”

Claire rocked back on her heels and complied, directing the thin beam of light from their last working flashlight to where Ben and Jesse were piercing through the rotten wood of a coffin with the blades of their shovels.

“The ‘torch’,” Ben mocked, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Watch out for the pitchforks.”

“Ha _ha_ ,” Jesse said with a harsh exhale on the last sound, accompanied by another hit on the coffin. “You mock my English again, mate, and you can do your grave desecrating on your own. Not my idea of a good time.” A last hit and he stumbled backward to avoid stepping inside the coffin. The pungent smell of death from the corpse rose up to them and Claire pressed an index under her nose while the boys grimaced in disgust.

“And miss out on all this? I don’t think so.” Ben pulled on the wood with a groan to enlarge the hole they’d made.

Jesse started to reply, his mouth twisted in annoyance, face glistening with sweat, but Claire heard a shuffle somewhere behind her and raised a hand to silence the boys. Her grip tightened on the shotgun clutched under her arm.

Ben immediately turned serious. “What is it?” he said quietly.

“Heard something.”

Jesse closed his mouth on whatever biting retort he’d wanted to make to Ben, and stood completely still, not making a sound that could distract them from listening out.

The cemetery was perfectly quiet, not even a breath of wind disturbing the silence. The rows of gravestones, neatly lined up and coming in different sizes and heights, looked in the dark like the gap-toothed jaws of some ageing predator. A high palm tree was planted right in the middle of the field, and for a moment Claire thought she saw something flash to its left, and then to its right, a slight figure that stood out pale against the dark background of the night sky.

“Here she comes,” Claire said, getting to her feet. “Keep going, I’ll cover for you.”

She turned her back to Ben and Jesse but could hear the jostling noises of them hurriedly destroying more of the coffin to access to the body, and then the _sh sh_ sound of the canister being shaken to sparkle it with salt. Trusting them to take care of the matter, she focused on the almost inscrutable darkness around her. The moon was reduced to a thin crescent and the stars were obscured by the city’s light pollution; the resulting meager lighting didn’t help Claire see any better. She peered into the night until spots of colors started to dance in front of her eyes.

“Almost done!” Ben called out. “Do you see anything?”

“No…” Maybe the ghost was gone. A ten-year old girl spirit, maybe she was too scared to confront them—but then, she was also a ten-year old girl spirit who’d been ripping apart anyone who came close to the house where she’d died. “I don’t… Can you feel that?”

The hair on the nape of her neck stood up and she shivered from a sudden chill. The tips of her fingers were getting numb. _Give me the strength to fight and make my aim true._

“Something’s here, at least,” Jesse said.

“Yeah. Why isn’t she—”

The click of Jesse’s lighter. In less than a minute, they'd be done.

“Watch out!” cried Jesse.

The girl was there, right in Claire’s face, close enough that she could see every details of the gory gouges slashed across her little face. The ghost’s bloodless lips moved, no sound coming out, and she grabbed Claire’s right wrist. Claire had to bite her lower lip to contain a cry of pain—it felt like a manacle of ice circling her wrist, the cold so sharp it burned, and it was spreading to her hand and the rest of her arm.

“Claire!”

With her other hand she reached blindly, trying to find the trigger. “I’m fine! I have it under control, don’t stop now!” To the ghost, she whispered, “Hold on, honey. It’s almost over.”

The girl blinked. Her eyes were gray, not like it was their natural color but like death had covered the irises with a dull veil. The rigged edges of her wounds made her face look deformed, bloated, but she had a small and delicate nose and an obviously fine bone structure. She had been a very pretty child—Claire had seen the pictures.

“Grab onto me.” The ghost tilted her head, blinked again, then raised her hand like an afterthought, probably to flick Claire out of her way. Claire pressed the trigger, and the girl exploded in a cloud of particles. Immediately after she heard the _whoooosshh_ of fire, and a high-pitched cry echoed in the night.

“Claire, you okay?”

Claire’s whole arm ached from the shock of the shotgun recoil and her wrist downright hurt, but she merely gave it a little shake and said, “I’m fine. Is she gone?”

Smelling like smoke and sweat, her boyfriends crowded her on both sides. “Did she hurt you?” Ben asked, examining her wrist, and Jesse said, “She’s gone. I can feel it.”

“Okay.” Claire freed herself from Ben’s grasp. “Let’s go home.”

Ben gathered their gear while Jesse lit up a cigarette without using his lighter. Ben grumbled a little about Jesse not helping him but without much conviction, because he knew that Jesse disapproved of the whole hunting gig and had come solely to please him. It was a bone of contention between the two of them and Claire tried to stay out of it, as she could see both sides of the argument. To Jesse—and to Claire too, if she was honest—the supernatural was something that belonged to your very self, or didn’t, and Jesse thought that Ben was only looking for trouble by wanting to hunt. But for Ben the supernatural was something that _happened_ to you, and if you didn’t want to be taken defenseless you had to learn how to throw the first punch.

They walked back to Ben’s car and Ben slid behind the wheel. He was obviously exhausted—he kept stifling yawns and Claire had caught him surreptitiously rubbing at his eyes—but he enjoyed driving. Besides, Claire was hurt and Jesse didn’t know how to drive so he knew none of them would fight him for the privilege. Claire opened the door on the passenger side but didn’t climb inside, waiting for Jesse. He had already burned through his first cigarette and was lighting up a second one.

“No smoking in my car,” Ben said.

“You guys go ahead. I’ll meet you later.”

Claire shared a look with Ben, and on a tacit agreement they decided not to comment. Claire kissed Jesse on the cheek and joined Ben in the car.

“Well, that went pretty well, don't you agree,” Ben commented after they had turned the corner and couldn’t see the iron gate from the cemetery anymore. “I think we’re getting good at this.”

His eyes were on the road and his body language was relaxed enough, but Claire was familiar with that tone of false cheerfulness. “He’ll be fine,” she said.

Ben’s jaw contracted. “I know smoking’s not going to be the thing that kills him, but he’s burning through this shit like a fire forest. And the not sleeping, and—”

“Ben. Give him some time.”

“It’s been six months since Alliance.”

This was an optimistic take on Jesse’s issues: if you really wanted to pinpoint the moment Jesse’s life had started to go wrong you probably had to go as far back as twelve years ago, when he’d realized the truth about what he was. It wouldn’t do any good to point it out to Ben, though. He was the type to think that every problem had its solution, and there was nothing any of them could do to change Jesse’s nature. You’d think that knowing the Winchesters would have taught Ben that sometimes you just have to live with the cracks.

“Six months isn’t that long.”

“Yeah, I kn—”

“His parents died. Because of him. Don't give me that look; Jesse acknowledges it himself. Some monster used him and his power to kill people and make him think he was the one doing it. Jesse can alter the world with a snap of his fingers, but that doesn’t mean he can fix himself faster than anyone else. Even he isn’t that powerful.”

“Okay, yeah.” Ben chewed on his lower lip, looking chastised. “Point taken. I know I can’t pressure him into getting better and I shouldn’t—I wish I just knew how to help him.”

Claire thought of the little ghost girl, with her ravaged face and her dead eyes, and knew that she wouldn’t be forgetting it anytime soon. Had they helped her? Or maybe they had just put an end to her suffering, which was sometimes the best you could wish for. She felt that Ben needed some kind of reassurance, though, and forced herself to tear her thoughts away from the ghost and look for the right words.

“I know you do. Just be there for him,” she said. “That’s all you can do.”

\---

“Claire? Are you listening to me?”

Claire bit back a sigh and raised her head from her open book to look at her mother. Amelia had her hair tied up into a high bun, and it gave her a perfectly polished look that she’d never tried for when Claire was growing up.

“I’m working, Mom.”

She wasn’t, not really. She had read all of three lines from her book for the past half-hour. She wasn’t even thinking about anything in particular, just unable to focus on the text, her eyes glazing over words she couldn’t seem to make any sense of.

Amelia’s fingers closed over the back of the chair across the table. Claire had covered that table with a variety of books, open or closed, of papers printed or scribbled all over. It was her way to claim the space as her own, her metaphorical ivory tower.

“Isn’t it always the case? You’re never not working.”

The reproach in her mother’s voice made Claire bristle. “Most parents would be happy to have a child dedicated to their studies.”

Just as Claire had known she would, her mother backed down immediately and smoothed her expression of displeasure. “But I am, sweetie. You know that.”

_Why am I doing this?_ Claire couldn’t understand that streak of meanness in her, that impulse that compelled her to play with her mother’s insecurities. There was never any outright conflict—that was even sort of the problem, because Amelia always went out of her way to avoid any kind of confrontation, probably out of fear that her daughter would walk the same path as her husband and abandon her. Not that they ever discussed any of what had happened. After years of pretending that episode of their past didn’t exist, Amelia had probably managed to convince herself of it.

“I was asking you what you wanted for dinner. It was just a simple question.”

“I’m not very hungry.”

But her mother had already turned her back on Claire and was walking back to the kitchen. “I was thinking about making pot roast. What do you think?”

Through the doorway, Claire could see glimpses of her mother puttering around the kitchen. Clearly, the conversation—or what passed for it between them—was now over.

“It sounds fine, Mom,” Claire said with a sigh.

But Amelia surprised her by reappearing in the doorway. “When will you invite your boyfriend for a weekend here?”

“My—what?”

“Your boyfriend. Ben, isn’t it? Don’t you remember, you told me about him a few months ago. Unless you broke up with him?”

“I—no. We’re still together.”

She couldn’t remember having talked about Ben to her mother before, but it was all too possible that she’d let out a throwaway mention, maybe trying in a moment of weakness to share something genuine of herself with Amelia. Whatever had been her intention then, Claire didn’t like that the conversation was slipping out of her control now. What did her mother want from her?

“Then why doesn’t he come next weekend?” Amelia went on, warming up to the subject. “No, wait, next weekend we’re invited at the Sanders’. The weekend after is Steve’s mother’s birthday—”

“I’ll talk to him about it,” Claire cut in. “I’ll let you know.”

She was let off the hook by her stepfather’s arrival. He greeted Claire with a smile and went to the kitchen to poke at what Amelia was making for dinner. For a moment, Claire was left alone in the living room to think about her mother’s demand. It wasn’t that she didn’t want Ben to meet her family—however tense their relationship was, she wasn’t ashamed of them, and she certainly wasn’t ashamed of him—but where would that leave Jesse? She knew Jesse himself would be willing to fade into the background, but there was no way Ben would let that fly.

She’d hoped her mother would drop the subject and eventually forget all about it, but surprisingly it was Steve who brought it up again during dinner. He’d just said grace and they were still holding hands, Steve’s sweaty palm feeling like a dead fish in Claire’s grip. He looked at her with an air of preemptive patience that he always wore when talking to her. She should feel worse about it than she did—but. It wasn’t that she disliked him. She could even acknowledge that he was a good man, if a bit boring.

“Claire, darling,” he said—and there it was, that familiar flash of irritation at the term of endearment. “Your mother and I would really love to meet your boyfriend.”

So they had discussed it, and Amelia undoubtedly hoped—foolishly—that the suggestion would go better if Steve was adding his weight to it. It just went to show how little she understood her daughter.

“I don’t know why everyone is making such a big deal of it,” Claire said, looking down to her plate. Her mother was a good cook, but right now the lumps of beef swimming in the meat juice looked unappetizing. “There’s really no need for—”

“Claire,” her mother said, “if that boy is part of your life, then it makes him family. How long have you two been dating?”

“A year.” Claire knew she should’ve lied when she saw the stricken look on her mother’s face. Obviously, she’d thought the relationship was more recent. “It’s really not—We’re not living together or anything.”

“But is it serious between you?”

“Define ‘serious’,” Claire said mulishly.

“Is he important to you?”

Claire could say no, and no one would be the wiser. Ben didn’t have to know—he had never asked to meet her family, probably sensing that the family dynamic was complicated. And their relationship, the whole threeway dating that they were doing, was not an easy matter either. Their meeting with Ben’s mother hadn’t gone smoothly, and their meeting with Jesse’s had been completely accidental. Claire couldn’t even envision how would it go if she tried to explain the truth to her mother and Steve. Not to mention the whole truth, like how they had met and everything about Jesse. She didn’t know how she would even broach the subject. Although maybe it would force Amelia to stop pretending she didn’t know the things she knew.

“Claire?”

“I don’t know.” She stabbed the meat in her plate with her fork. “I just don’t know,” she repeated, and hated herself for lying.

\---

_Help._

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help. She was trying, but the fog was impenetrable, and the ground yielded under her feet every time she tried to take a step. She wasn't sure where she was, because her sense of direction had gone haywire and she didn’t know right from left and up from down. For all she knew she was going in circles, chasing her own tail.

_Help me._

Flashes of distress that were not her own reached her and her heartbeat started to race, so fast that she felt a little sick from it. She _had_ to get to the source of the call—the thought imposed itself on her, as evident as the shape of her own name. She tried to start running but her feet sunk into the ground like it was quicksand. The dirt was clinging to her feet, forcing her to pull on them so she could free them.

_Where are you?_

She hadn’t opened her mouth to speak, and yet she could hear her words echo around her. The fog seemed to thicken, swirls of it curling around her arms. She couldn’t see her feet anymore and it gave her the troubling impression that she had become legless.

_Help. No, no, no, no,_ help!

_I’m trying!_

She was getting exhausted, losing her fight against the ground that wanted to swallow her up, each step getting her buried a little deeper until she had mud up to her knees and she couldn’t move at all. She grunted and huffed and moaned, clinging to her knees and trying to pull her leg out. Her arms and legs ached and sweat ran down her back. It was useless, she wasn’t getting anywhere, she wouldn’t make it in time—

_Mommy!_

Claire woke up with that scream drilling into her ear, her heart in her throat, and her cheeks wet with tears. A terrible feeling of failure was weighing her down, and she tried to shake it off as she fought against the last shreds of sleep addling her mind.

“Just a dream,” she murmured to herself, sitting up in the bed and wiping her cheeks with her palm.

“D’you have a nightmare?” mumbled Ben, the sound of his voice muffled by his pillow. “You okay?”

Where was Jesse? He wasn’t chiming in and now that Claire’s eyes were getting used to the dark she couldn’t see anyone on Ben’s other side. Her adrenaline spiked again and she forced herself to pause and take in her surroundings. There were curtains hanging over the window, when she had been expected blinds. The tick-tock of an old-fashioned clock resounded like a heartbeat in the nightly quiet. They were in Claire’s own apartment and not at Ben’s, she remembered it now, and Jesse was gone for the night to have dinner with his birth mother and then wander who knows where. Claire envied him his ability escape to wherever he wanted in the blink of an eye. That kind of freedom was hard to fathom.

“It’s fine,” she gently told Ben. “You should go back to sleep.”

“Who needs sleep,” he said lightly, hauling himself to sit up next to her. “Certainly not the three of us. Okay, tell your old friend Ben: what was your dream about?”

“Someone… was calling for my help.” She shivered slightly and hugged herself to keep warm. Ben took it as his cue to wrap an arm around her and tuck her against his side. He was warm, sleep warm, different from Jesse’s unnatural body heat. “I couldn’t get to them, whoever they were.”

“Hmm. Sounds like a stress dream, if you want to hear the opinion of an expert.”

“I’ll bow to your expertise.” Ben had quite the experience with nightmares, although a lot of them had actually been memories buried by Castiel. “I’ve never had a dream that felt like this, though.”

“What’s been stressing you out lately?” He snuggled closer, wiggling ticklish fingers in the hollow of her throat, trying to make her laugh.

“Quit it.” She tried to squirm away, but not hard enough to wrench herself from his hold. “Come on, Ben, stop it! Don’t—no, no,” but helpless giggles were already bubbling up her throat.

“You _will_ talk,” he said, but stopped tickling her and leaned against her side. “What’s bothering you?”

“Well.” Jesse’s mental health, of course, that thing with her mother—but she didn’t know how to explain it to Ben, his relationship with his mother was so different from hers. “Nothing other than the usual. There was something about that dream—it felt so real.”

“Real.” That single word sounded heavy, like something bad had occurred to Ben. “Like a memory? Or like…”

He trailed off, but she had connected the dots and knew what he was referring to. “The mare, you mean. You think something’s inducing the nightmare. Like what happened to Jesse.” She felt his nod against the side of her head. “I don’t know. It can’t be the same mare, and—Anyway, I didn’t feel anything like the symptoms Jesse had: no weight pressing down on my chest, and my hair doesn’t feel tangled.” She still combed her fingers through her long hair, checking reflexively for the truth of her words.

“Maybe you should talk to him about it…”

“I don’t want to stir up that kind of memory if I can avoid it. He doesn’t need that.”

“No, you’re right.”

“But… it probably wouldn’t hurt to take precautions.”

With Ben’s foray into hunting they always kept a large quantity of salt at hand, so a single ring of salt around the bed was no trouble. Claire usually liked her space when she slept, but for once she fell into a slumber snuggled against Ben, his arms around her. If she didn’t have another dream that night, she didn’t know whether the salt or his presence was the cause.

\---

Tuesdays, as per Ben and his friends’ tradition, were movie nights. Katie and Blake, Ben’s best friends from way back, and occasionally Blake’s girlfriend Jenny, unvaryingly showed up around 6 with alcohol and snacks, and they watched one, two, three or more movies until everyone fell asleep over each other. Nights when Claire didn’t feel sociable she just stayed at home, and Ben had never complained about it, but she knew that she had to make the effort from time to time. It came with the girlfriend territory.

“While I’m at it, who wants a refill?” Katie asked, shaking the bottle she had in her hand to focus everyone’s attention on it. Her dark hair was a mess and with the dark flush brought to her cheeks by alcohol she looked like a mischievous imp.

“Claire?”

“I’m good,” Claire said, holding her glass close to her chest.

She wasn’t terribly fond of being drunk, but she’d found that just the right amount of liquor helped her loosen up in society. Right now, with the way the world felt fuzzy around the edges, she thought that she’d had enough. Jesse, sitting on the floor on the other side of Katie, raised his glass and called for more.

“Here you go, Vomit-boy,” Katie said with a smirk as she poured vodka in Jesse’s glass.

Jesse winced and shoved playfully at Katie, who snickered and barely avoided spilling the bottle’s content over him. Claire recognized the work anecdote they were referring to. Despite having known Katie for a shorter time than Claire had, Jesse was a lot more at ease with her. Some of it stemmed from the fact that both of them were working at the same family restaurant. The rest was that Jesse, in spite of his odd past and half-demonic nature, was more adept than her at dealing with people. For some reason Katie didn’t seem to like Claire too much, although she took pains in hiding it for Ben’s sake.

“Do I want to know?” asked Blake from his spot on the loveseat where he was cuddled with his girlfriend.

Jenny was a mousy sort of a girl, with ebony skin and short-cropped hair, and seemingly even less fond of social events than Claire herself was. She looked amused at Katie and Jesse’s antics, but there was little chance that she would volunteer a comment.

“Nope, you don’t want to know,” Jesse said, nose in his glass, but Katie chirped away, “Kids at work seem to looove Jesse. They especially love to puke on him.”

She launched herself in the animated tale of Jesse’s struggles with little kids, making even Jenny giggle. Having heard the stories from the man himself, Claire quickly tuned her out and looked around for Ben. She found him on the phone, standing in the furthest corner of the room, angled away from them. There was a frown between his eyebrows and he was speaking in a low voice—probably to one of the Winchesters, then. Katie and Blake had met Dean before when he'd rescued them from changelings, and they knew a little bit about Jesse, but Ben always tried to shelter them from the worst of it, and there was Jenny to take into account.

Claire put her glass down on the coffee table and rose to her feet, joining him just as he put an end to the communication.

“How’s Dean doing?” she asked.

The unhappy line of Ben’s mouth told her that her aim had been true. Dean had suffered a concussion months ago when they’d been hunting in Jesse’s childhood town for what had killed his parents. Even though she had not seen the Winchesters since that episode, Claire knew that Dean was still suffering from the after-effects, and that it worried Ben.

“Bad day,” Ben said. “It was Sam on the phone: Dean’s been too dizzy the whole day to even get up. He’s also a nightmare to deal with and I think Sam’s patience is wearing thin.” Ben tried to smile, but it wobbled quickly.

“What’s the doctor saying?”

“Post-concussion syndrome. But for the symptoms to last for so long after the injury, it may mean that he’ll never get rid of them completely. There’s a chance that the headaches for one are here to stay.”

“Well.” Claire locked her arm behind his elbow and tugged him in the direction of his friends. “I’m sure Dean wouldn’t want you to spend your time moping over his health problems. He’s been through worse.”

“I know.” Ben sighed. He turned away from her, facing the bookshelves. “There’s nothing I can do to help anyone.”

He scratched with his nail where the resin of the particle board the shelves were made of had chipped, uncovering the pressed wood under. Claire knew his distress was real, but he looked like a pouting child and she snorted.

“Come on, Ben. Self-pity is unbecoming.”

The quip managed to wrench a smile out of him. “You are ruthless.”

“You know me: a heart made out of stone.”

He huffed softly, shaking his head, maybe in disagreement. Claire eventually dragged him back to the couch where Katie welcomed him with literal open arms and offered to fill his glass. Jesse, looking the most sober of the bunch—Claire wasn’t sure that alcohol actually had that strong of an effect on him—shot them a worried look, probably picking up on Ben’s somber mood.

“ _It’s Dean_ ,” Claire mouthed, and Jesse’s expression darkened.

He too was concerned over Dean’s problems, but it was more because he saw them as a consequence of the hunting lifestyle and as proof that if they kept at it, Ben and Claire would end up dead or broken. Claire gave him a small shrug, a _what can we do_ sort of gesture, and turned to the TV screen where the movie that almost everyone had forgotten unfolded. It was a non-descript slasher movie, and currently a blond girl in a red prom dress was running down a slope, her face smeared with mascara-stained tear streaks.

_The blond girl always gets it._ This was what Blake had told her when he had explained to her the rules of slasher movies. _Good to know_ , she’d replied.

She had another drink and watched the movie, and the rest of the evening was spent in a sort of daze. Whether because of the alcohol or lack of sleep she felt like her surroundings were flimsy, a cardboard cutout that would crumble if she breathed too hard on it. She could hear Ben, Jesse, Katie, Blake talking, with the occasional intervention from Jenny, but they all sounded far away like she was trapped in her own bubble of silence.

_Help._

No, no, not this again. It wasn’t real. It was just a dream.

_Somebody help me._

The voice was clear, high-pitched, and she’d thought before that it was a woman’s voice but now it sounded more like a child. _Help me, help me._ Claire shook her head, trying to get rid of the cries for help the same way she would get water out of her ears. She had to be imagining this. She started to get up, thinking that she would splash some cold water on her face and break the spell, but then, in a corner next to the bookshelves crowded with books and magazines, she saw a boy of about eight standing, looking her right in the eye like they were the only two people in the room.

_Please_. The boy’s lips formed the word but it took half a second for the plea to reach her ears. The boy wore a green t-shirt and shorts and blue sneakers. His knees and elbows were scratched, but the scratches were old, healing, and looked to be from nothing more than ordinary childhood mishaps. His face, however, was pale and bloodied and his eyes wide in fear. Claire stood up, heart hammering in her chest, and extended an arm to reach out to him.

“Where are you?”

_Help me._

“I don’t know what I can do to help!”

The boy startled and turned around, even though there was nothing to see behind him but the wall. He raised his hands in defense and Claire could hear his breathing, loud enough that it drowned even the sound of her heart.

“What do you want me to do?” she called. “What’s after you?”

The boy turned back to her, eyes bright with unshed tears, and said,

_Leviathan._

“No, don’t go!”

“Claire?”

It felt like the world jumped back to her, colors, sounds, sensations too vivid and aggressive. She blinked a few times, trying to make sense of her change of station: she’d been standing—she could swear she had—but now she was sitting again in the couch, her legs drawn against her, her glass wedged in the space between her thighs and her stomach.

“Claire, are you okay?”

Katie’s face suddenly popped into her vision field, her dark brows joined together in a frown.

“What?” Claire managed to get out, unsure why her mouth was so parched. She lifted a hand to rub at her face. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, you, like, screamed all of a sudden.”

“Claire?” It was Jesse this time, and she saw him walk around Katie to kneel at her feet. “I think you fell asleep and had a bad dream.”

“Okay, people,” Ben said, “I think it’s time we all go to bed.”

No one protested or even commented, but Claire still avoided Ben’s friends’ eyes when she said goodbye. This was beyond embarrassing. They’d all seen her in a vulnerable position and it didn’t matter much when it came to Ben and Jesse, but to everyone else it was off-limits. When they were all gone she had to take a few minutes to gather her wits before she could confront Jesse and Ben’s worry.

“Another dream of the too-real kind?” Ben asked. Jesse’s face lost all color at the question, which made the few freckles dusting his nose and cheeks stand out.

“Yes. I didn’t even realize I was asleep, and this time I didn’t just hear someone call for me. I saw a little boy. And the strangest thing was—I think he looked _back_.”

“You think that—You think that it could be—” Jesse couldn’t even finish his sentence, and despite her head still feeling like it was filled with cotton, Claire felt a pang in her chest at his distress.

“I don’t know,” Ben said, his mouth set in a grim line. “But tonight we salt every door and window. And tomorrow, I’m calling Sam and Dean.”

\---

“Leviathan?” Ben had put Sam on speaker and his phone was resting on his lap. “Yeah, we’ve heard about it before.” There was a muffled clunk and they heard Dean’s voice in the background going, _fuck_.

“In the Old Testament and the Tanakh,” Claire said, grasping for the memories of the hours she’d spent pouring through fine pages, “they’re supposed to be sea monsters, if I remember it correctly.”

“I came across Leviathans when I was doing research on Purgatory,” Sam continued. “Purgatory is…”

“I know what Purgatory is. I went to Sunday school.”

“Yes, but what we’ve uncovered is slightly different. Purgatory is where monsters go after they’ve been killed—monsters’ afterlife, if you will, half-way between Heaven and Hell.”

From where he was sitting on Ben’s other side, Claire caught the look on Jesse’s face, the sudden pallor, and guessed at what he must be thinking: where would he go when he died? If he could even die. Claire had never turned her thoughts that way—though she bet Jesse had—but it gave her a feeling close to vertigo, like Jesse was on the other side of a very wide abyss and she had no hope of getting to him before he fell into its depths. She fought the urge to reach out and hold onto him.

“It’s also home to a bunch of fun creatures forgotten by God,” Sam was saying, “including Leviathans, God’s oldest creation.”

“But you’ve never faced a Leviathan before?” Jesse asked tensely.

“No. Well… Someone opened Purgatory a while ago to get to the souls inside, but I don't think there was any Leviathan.” He ended on a questioning intonation. 

“No giant sea monster, no,” came Dean’s slightly more distant voice. “You should ask Castiel about it.”

Claire made herself not react to the name. “Why?”

“That’s quite a long story. One that I’m sure Cas will be delighted to tell you.”

“Dean,” Sam hissed, but then he seemed to remember that they were not alone. “Where did you hear about Leviathans, anyway?”

Claire wasn’t sure she was ready to own to ‘ _in a dream_ ’ with the Winchesters, not when she didn’t understand what was going on. “Someone mentioned it to me. I was curious to know if they were actually supposed to exist.”

“Hmm.” Claire could tell that Sam wasn’t convinced. “Well, that’s not a solid yes, and if they do they’re supposed to be locked up in Purgatory.”

“Wait,” Ben said, “didn’t you say that someone opened Purgatory a while ago? Did that someone remembered to lock the door behind them?”

There was a long silence on the Winchesters’ side. “Dean’s right,” Sam finally said. “I think you need to talk to Castiel. I’ll do some research on my end.”

Claire, Ben and Jesse shared a look: another story from the brothers’ very busy past, and obviously they didn’t want to share it over the phone. Not that Claire was in a position to blame them. They all promised to keep each other updated, and Ben hung up the phone. He looked at Claire, brow furrowed with concern.

“What do you wanna do, Claire? Do we try to call Castiel to ask him about Purgatory?”

“You could tell him about your dreams, too,” Jesse said. “Maybe they’re not mare-induced dreams. They could be an angel thing.”

Claire thought maybe she preferred the first option, but she wasn’t about to tell that to Jesse. Also, she wasn’t one to lie to herself.

“I think you’re right,” she said. “They seem too focused to be triggered by a mare. They’re not tied to any of my bad memories or real-life concerns. It’s always the same—someone calling for my help.”

“Do you think—” Ben started, eyes wide.

“That someone could actually be calling for your help?” Jesse finished for him.

That sounded ludicrous—she wasn’t a telepath or anything, she merely had some leftover knowledge from her short time as an angel vessel. But remembering the way the boy had looked at her, tried to reach out to her— _Help me. Somebody help me._

“I don’t know if that boy was calling for me specifically,” she said slowly. “Maybe he was just calling to whoever was listening.”

“But how were you even listening?” Jesse insisted.

She didn’t have any supernatural ability that would work with human beings. Angels, on the other hand… She shook her head.

“I don’t know. We’ll call for Castiel later, right now I just—Not right now.”

Ben had to leave for school and Claire was supposed to work on her thesis, but found herself cruising through her Bible, looking for references to Leviathans. Jesse kept her silent company, sitting at the table and reading a book of his own with intense focus, a deep crease between his eyebrows. They never explicitly talked about it, but as they’d gotten to know each other it had become rapidly obvious that Jesse had some undiagnosed learning disability that had only been made worse by the fact that he’d never finished school. Claire had done some research on reading strategies and had mentioned them to Jesse, and now he had taken upon himself to regularly practice, every time with a determination of the ‘I’ll get it right even if it kills me’ kind. Sometimes, Claire asked him to read out loud for her. Today, she was too focused on her own reading.

“Listen to this,” she said after a while, and Jesse looked up from his book. “ ‘In that day,’” she read, “ ‘the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.’ That sword,” she tapped the word on the page with her finger, “I wonder if it exists.”

“Another thing you could ask Castiel.” He gave her a long considering look. “You don’t have to be there for that conversation to happen. Ben and me can talk to him.”

“I need to be the one to call for him.”

“I think it would work for Ben too. Castiel admitted he looked out for him on Dean’s orders, so that means he would answer to his prayers, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, probably.”

She had confronted Castiel before and hadn’t broken down or anything, so she didn’t know what made her hesitate this time. Or was it really reluctance that she felt? Everything about Castiel and his role in her life was confusing. She closed her Bible and put it down on the couch next to her.

“I could call him right now,” she said. Nothing like the present.

“Right now? Not waiting for Ben, then.” Jesse closed his book and took a deep breath in, like he was getting ready to dive into water. “Alright. Let’s do this. Call onto the forces of Heaven.”

“Castiel is cut off from Heaven,” she reminded him with a small smile.

He only half-smiled in response. He was nervous, although you would have to know him well to notice it—it gave her a jolt to realize that she did know him well enough by now to see through him—and it was understandable: Castiel, after all, had tried to kill him when he was a child. She could have given him an out, suggested that he go take a walk somewhere—the world was his playground—and that she would talk to Castiel alone; in fact, it was so tempting that she knew she wanted it more for her sake than for Jesse’s, and that fact kept her quiet on the matter. Besides, he probably wouldn’t like her pointing out his discomfort.

She closed her eyes, breathing deeply. She tried to appease her thoughts, like before entering meditation, even if it would probably not have any influence on the outcome. She wanted to be mentally prepared for the conversation to come. Even without her sight to rely on she knew exactly where Jesse was in the room, and it wasn’t because he was making any noise: the taint was like a beacon in the dark, or rather like a bad smell that polluted the air around it. But she was so used to it by now that it didn’t feel as unpleasant as it did when they first met. Now, it only felt like Jesse to her, something familiar and comforting.

“Please, Castiel,” she said, aloud for Jesse’s benefit. “I need your help.”

She waited, keeping her eyes shut. She heard Jesse shift positions, making the chair he was sitting on creak. Like with Jesse, she didn’t need to see to know the exact moment when Castiel manifested. The sensation was widely different, though: it was like melting inside the heart of a star, the only true warmth she’d ever felt. It felt, shamefully, like she was coming home.

She blinked and there he was, standing between the couch where she sat and the table where Jesse had been reading; at some point Jesse had stood up and now looked about to run at a moment’s notice.

“Hello, Claire,” Castiel said.

He wore her father’s trench coat and suit, unchanged from the day she had first met him, when he had told her he wasn’t her father. And he wasn’t, that much was glaringly obvious: he had her father’s face but he didn’t hold himself the way Jimmy did, didn’t move like Jimmy, didn’t smile or use his eyebrows the same way at all; even his voice was different. Claire didn’t need the resonance between Castiel’s grace and the small amount that lingered inside her for him to not feel like her father, but merely like a distant relative of his.

“Castiel,” she said.

Jesse, not one for being ignored, grumbled, “Hey, I’m here too.”

Castiel slightly turned to look at him. “Jesse Turner.”

After a second, like he needed the time to remember social graces someone else had forced onto him, he gave Jesse a small nod of acknowledgment.

“You need my help,” he then said to Claire, not making it a question.

“Yes.” She had not taken the time to think of how much she wanted to tell him, and she found herself hesitating. Keeping secrets, though, would probably be pointless. “I’ve had some dreams, lately. At first I thought that was just what they were—dreams. But they’re relentless and they feel… peculiar. I think they might be something else.”

“What are those dreams about?”

“Someone calling for my help. Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure it’s always the same someone. Anyway, recently there’s been a new development: I saw a boy, a child of almost ten, and it looked like he was addressing me directly. And he said something else: Leviathan. Ben called the Winchesters and they said they’d heard about Leviathans before in relation to Purgatory. They also said I should ask you about it.”

“Have they,” said Castiel, unexpressive. It was hard to tell whether he was displeased. “Well, it’s quite a long story, and I can’t say that I come out of it unblemished.”

“I’m sure we can weather the shock,” Jesse said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell us all about it.”

Castiel did, with maybe a little more thoroughness that Claire would have expected: it had all happened after the Apocalypse had been averted, and Lucifer sent back to his Cage with his brother Michael. Castiel told them about how he’d entered an alliance with the demon Crowley, trying to gain the upper hand in the civil war that had ravaged Heaven and had opposed him to the last-standing archangel, Raphael. In precise words and a measured tone, he explained how he’d thought that in order to get the power that he needed, he had no choice but to try and open Purgatory, and absorbed thousands of souls to feed on their power. Of course, the Winchesters hadn’t agreed with that course of action.

“And that’s when you broke the wall in Sam Winchester’s mind,” Jesse said darkly. He’d helped deal with the consequences, one year ago, when he had assisted Castiel in healing Sam.

“Indeed,” said Castiel, and he looked impenetrable as ever.

But Claire knew him more intimately than she knew Jesse, or even Ben—and wasn’t that another startling realization—and she wasn’t fooled so easily: she could hear the heaviness in his voice, the weight of years of guilt wearing him down. She didn’t go as far as feeling sorry for him.

“And did you succeed in the end?”

“In a way, I did. I opened Purgatory, absorbed the souls, and managed to kill Raphael.”

He explained how he’d gone a little power crazy after that, but Dean had managed to convince him to release the souls and send them back to Purgatory, which they’d sealed again. As far as they knew, no one had ever tried to open it again, and they’d never heard of any Leviathans manifesting on Earth.

“And they’d be hard to miss,” Jesse commented. “What with being giant sea monsters and all.”

“What I don’t understand,” Claire said, “is why you’re a runaway from Heaven now, when you succeeded in killing your enemy back then.”

Castiel sighed, an uncomfortably human sound. “It wasn’t that easy. Raphael was dead, but it didn’t mean that his followers were ready to surrender. I was looking to put an end to the chaos on Heaven, but it didn’t quite work out that way. New factions appeared, both within Raphael’s faction and within ours. New lines of battle were drawn. Eventually, too many of my own followers disagreed with me, and I was, how to put it—laid off. That’s when I went back to Earth.”

It was an awfully short summary for an eight-year gap—but it wasn’t Claire’s concern right now so she let it go.

“Do you have any idea of who that boy could be? How was he able to reach out to me the way he did?”

“I can see only two possibilities here,” Castiel said slowly, and Claire knew he only considered one of them seriously. “Either this boy is a psychic, and he was able to contact you because your mind is more open to that kind of thing that the average human. But if that was the case—” He cast what Claire could only call a hesitant look in Jesse’s direction. “If that was the case I think that the Anti-Christ would have felt it too.”

Jesse rolled his eyes but didn’t seem overly vexed at the appellation.

“What’s the other possibility?” Claire asked.

“That the boy is one of the fallen angels.”

\---

When Ben came back home, Castiel had been gone for a few hours but Claire hadn’t stopped for one moment mulling over what he’d told them.

“What?” Ben said as soon as he came in and had a good look at Claire and Jesse; he toed off his shoes and dropped his bag to the floor. “What happened? Should I get my gun?”

“No, you can keep it holstered, Billy the Kid,” Jesse said.

He was idly doodling on the back of an envelope what he had explained once was a demon’s true face as he could see it—he drew it in graphic, horrifyingly realistic details. Claire wondered if it was a specific demon’s face—maybe the one that had killed his parents—or if they all looked identical to him. Jesse crumpled the envelope in his fist with a crunch and walked over to Ben for a welcome kiss.

“Castiel happened,” Claire said before she dutifully reported everything Castiel had said to them.

“Man,” Ben said. “And here I worried you might get bored in my absence. What does it say about the state of Heaven that so many angels would rather fall than stay there? No wonder Castiel is a runaway.”

Ben dropped on the couch next to Claire; he slipped a casual arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him. Jesse went to sit across the couch with his feet over Ben’s lap, and Ben tried to good-naturally push him away for half a minute before he gave up.

“So,” he went on, “how many of these kid angels did Castiel say were around?”

“As far as he’s aware, about a dozen. He’s taken upon himself to track them and check on them, just to… watch out for them, I guess. They’re between eight and a few months old.”

“And the eight-year old’s been kidnapped.”

“Yes.”

“By Leviathans.”

Jesse snorted. “We’re still working on that part of the theory.”

“You know,” Ben said. “It could be that all this hunting has made us take things too literally: maybe ‘Leviathan’ doesn’t mean actual sea monsters. Maybe it’s the name of some kind of organization, or a place. Or, or, maybe it’s a code name.”

“Well,” Jesse said. “It’s a black metal band.”

“’Leviathan’ has been a lot of things in human culture,” Claire said, and then felt unsettled by the way she’d said “human culture”—like Castiel would. “The question is, would an eight-year-old know about them? I didn’t read Thomas Hobbes in elementary school and I doubt this has changed much.”

“This is me pretending I know what you’re referring to,” Jesse said, gesturing to his face. “But that kid’s only looking like an eight-year old, isn’t he? He’s actually, like, thousands of years old, so your point is moot.”

“From what I know,” _remember from Castiel’s memories_ , “the kid would probably not recall anything from his life as an angel, so no, my point still stands.”

“So who would kidnap an ex angel? What do they want with him?” Ben asked in his thinking voice. “If they even know what he is, of course.”

He had curled a hand—the one from the arm that wasn’t draped over Claire—around Jesse’s ankle and was running his thumb absentmindedly over the bone that stuck out. Claire found herself oddly taken by the sight.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Because they think he knows something or have something they want?”

“You just said that he wouldn’t remember anything from when he was an angel.”

“Maybe the kidnapper doesn’t know that.”

That night, Claire dreamed of the boy again, and didn’t encounter the same barrier she had felt the other times. It was like talking to Castiel and learning about the fallen angels had set something loose and she was more receptive to the boy’s message. This time the script diverged from the repeated calls for help, and Claire had the feeling that the boy was more aware that he was actually talking to someone.

_Cold_ , he said in a distant, echoing voice. _Hungry._

“Do you know where you are?” Claire tried to ask him. “Did you have a good look at the people who took you?” If they were even people.

But the boy repeated his complaints in a loop, sometimes asking for his parents—who, Castiel had said, had been murdered in the kidnapping, so Claire wasn’t really keen on that line of conversation. She woke up to a sharp sense of sorrow and guilt, like she’d lost someone very dear but couldn’t remember that person’s name.

“Another dream?” Ben mumbled sleepily. Jesse was probably already up, because she couldn’t see his form shaping the covers on the other side of Ben.

“Yeah.”

“Anything new?”

_Cold. Hungry_. That poor boy, all on his own, no hope of rescue because his connection to Claire was revealing itself to be perfectly useless.

“Nothing that helps,” she said.

\---

The next morning, Claire was in her office at school—or at least what passed for an office: it was really more of an upgraded closet. No windows, two of its walls lined with tables to support the two computers—only one of them ever working at any given time—and boxes containing old textbooks, old CDs and DVDs, and piles of hand-outs that someone at printed at some point and never distributed. In the corner there was a huge piece of cardboard where a former TA had painted caricatures of various professors. It had been there for so long that, in her years at CSULB, Claire had never met the artist.

She was supposed to share the office with two other TAs, but the space was so narrow that they’d purposely decided on different office hours so that they would never be there together at the same time. She was working on her laptop, foregoing the school computers, had been working for some time, and it was only a sharp pang of hunger that signaled to her that she’d probably been at it too long.

She looked at her phone to see if she’d received any calls or texts, as she always put it on mute when she was working. She was feeling faintly dizzy, and tried to remember if maybe she’d forgotten to eat breakfast. The letters and numbers on her phone screen were blurring and she rubbed at her eyes, scrunching her nose in annoyance. She hoped she wasn’t coming down with something.

When it happened, she had just turned off her computer and was in the process of putting it away into her bag, thinking about whether she wanted to buy herself a snack or wait for lunchtime. The vision hit her hard: her office disappeared, and, for a moment, she could see nothing but a white-gray background, like she was lost in the fog. Then she was suddenly somewhere else, in an underground crawl space with concrete walls and surface soil, pipes running in the back, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling which was barely a few inches over her head. She was cold, damp, hungry, exhausted, frightened. She could hear footsteps from above and knew that he was coming for her.

“Claire?”

Someone pushed the door open—there was a white light—someone entered the room, a woman. Claire screamed as pain consumed her, her vision blinded with intense light.

“Oh my god, Claire! Are you okay? I’m calling 911!”

“No,” Claire ground out. She grabbed the person’s wrist and realized it was Tina, one of her fellow TAs who shared the office with her. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine,” Tina said, furrowing her dark brows, but she lowered her arm when Claire let her go. “Are you hurting anywhere?”

“No.” And it was the truth; she wasn’t feeling any more pain, although she was a bit shaky.

“Are you going to be sick?”

“No. Really, I’m fine.”

Claire tried to smile and to bite back her annoyance. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Tina—Tina was nice, and fairly tolerant of Claire’s oddness—but friendly interactions didn’t come easily to Claire even when she was at her best, and she wasn’t right now. She tried to stand and her knees gave out, and even if she quickly regained her balance it made Tina frown again and say, “Maybe I should call your boyfriend to pick you up.”

Claire shook her head. Tina had heard her say “my boyfriend” on occasion, but she wasn’t aware that this term covered two different people. None of Claire’s personal acquaintances were, and it was the way she preferred it.

“I’ll do it myself.”

It took a few more minutes of reassuring Tina that she was going to be fine, that she didn’t need a ride, that she didn’t need a doctor, and yes, she was fine to walk out of the building by herself. She needed fresh air and she needed to be alone. Not that she said that last part to Tina, not worded that way, but Tina probably got the message, because, when she let Claire go, she looked slightly hurt.

Claire took the stairs—she never used the elevator—and to her relief she didn’t cross anyone on her way down. Even though she was starting to feel more like herself, she knew she still had to look out of sorts, and she didn’t want to have to fend off anyone else’s concern.

What had happened there could only mean one thing: that the boy, the “kid angel” as Ben had called the reincarnated fallen angels, must have outlived his usefulness to whoever had kidnapped him and been killed. _Castiel_ , she thought helplessly, but no, it wasn’t the moment for Castiel to materialize on campus in broad daylight, and besides, _she_ didn’t need any help.

She pushed the front door and was welcomed by a rush of warmth that contrasted with the AC-controlled temperature inside. She wasn’t really surprised to find Castiel waiting for her by the entrance. Standing there with his absurd trench coat that didn’t fit the spring Californian weather, he looked like he’d been photoshopped onto the sunny background.

“Claire,” Castiel said. “I heard your call.”

“I hope no one saw you appear out of thin air.”

He looked unconcerned by the thought. Jesse was that way too, convinced that anyone who ever saw him teleport would find a way to rationalize it to themselves and that there was no need for stealth. It made her uneasy to realize how similar Castiel and Jesse could be in their alien way of thinking.

“I had some sort of a vision,” she said in a hushed voice, coming closer so he’d be able to hear her. “I saw—”

“I know,” Castiel said. “I felt it too.”

“So he’s… dead.” She’d known it, but it was a renewed shock to get confirmation. “How—wasn’t there anything you could do to stop it? Why couldn’t you find him the way you always find me?”

Castiel looked infinitely sad at those words, and Claire felt her stomach churn at seeing that expression on her father’s face.

“I can’t. If he’d still had his grace I could have found him anywhere, but he doesn’t, and whoever took him must have applied some kind of a seal so he couldn’t be found.”

“Who could do that?”

“Probably another angel,” Castiel said, looking somber. “And now he or she got what they wanted and we don’t even know what side they’re on.”

What a comforting thought. But Claire disagreed with Castiel that it mattered whose side the kidnapper was on in the angel conflict. Someone who kidnapped and murdered a child—it didn’t matter if that child had once been an immortal being—wasn’t someone she wanted to share a side with.

\---

She couldn’t not tell Ben and Jesse about what had happened; even if she didn’t like it, she knew that they would be fussing over her, Ben especially. On the couch, wedged between the both of them, Claire tried to persuade the boys that it really wasn’t that big of a deal. After all, she hadn’t been the one to be killed.

“Do you want some tea?” Ben asked, fiddling with the hem of his t-shirt, his fingers twitching with nervous energy. “I’ll make you some tea.”

Ben had inherited from his mother the belief that tea and herbal infusions were the remedy to all ailments. Claire wasn’t so sure about it herself, but tea had the undisputable advantage of giving him something to do.

“Tea sounds perfect.” She didn’t force herself to smile, unsure of how it would come out.

Ben disappeared in the kitchen and Jesse leaned back on the arm of the couch to look at Claire. “He can be a pain when he’s worried, can he?”

Claire shot a swift glance in direction of the kitchen. “Bet you’re glad he’s laying off you.”

“Yeah. That was my first thought, actually,” Jesse said in a voice dripping with sarcasm, his faint Australian accent getting thicker. “Thank you so much for taking over the crown of insanity.”

“Well, you can have your crown back anytime.”

They shared a look, and Claire saw Jesse’s attempt at levity melt away from his face. He looked tired, his mouth tight and his eyes shadowed, but then he always looked this way lately and Claire had gotten so used to it that it had become unremarkable to her. Did it make her a worse partner than Ben, who never stopped wringing himself over it?

“How are you doing, by the way?” she asked.

He snorted, averting his eyes. “Don’t you try to turn the tables on me.”

“I’m just asking. I try not to pry, but I just…”

“Well, I’m doing fine. Or—taking it one day at a time, I guess. Feels like I’m a broken pot and I have to hold the pieces together without glue. I know Ben’s frustrated—”

“Don’t make this about Ben. Because he loves you Ben wants you to get better for _you_ , and not for himself.”

Jesse’s eyes stopped wandering around the room to zero in on her, and the sudden dryness in her mouth pushed her to swallow, trying to bring in some moisture. She’d never told him she loved him; it was easy to talk about Ben’s love because Ben’s feelings were like the sun, a warm constant.

“We should call the Winchesters.”

Ben’s voice startled Claire, although she managed to hide it. He was leaning in the doorway with a teapot in his hand; apparently, he’d decided that everyone was in need of a good cup of tea. If he had heard what they were saying he gave no indication of it.

“Mate, this is your answer to everything,” Jesse said with an eye roll.

Ben snorted and walked to the couch, putting the teapot down on the coffee table.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you have the feeling that Castiel's trying to keep you out of the loop?”

“A misguided attempt to protect me, I imagine.” It was funny that Castiel would try to protect her, when before they had been one. “That’s a promise he made to my father. Sometimes I wonder if maybe he thinks he has become my father.”

“If Castiel's involved in this, chances are that Sam and Dean know more than they let on. And trying to keep us out of it because they want to protect us sounds just like something that they’d do.”

Jesse smirked, and Claire felt the corner of her own mouth curl up at Ben’s disgruntled tone.

“We’ll have to force ourselves on this case,” Ben continued, pointedly ignoring their reactions.

He made another trip to the kitchen to bring them three green stoneware tea cups Blake and Katie had gotten him for his last birthday, and started to pour tea. Steam whirled up from the cups, and bits of loose tealeaves danced in the amber liquid. More than the taste, Claire enjoyed the way tea looked and smelled. It actually was a little relaxing.

“Force ourselves—kind of like you did last time,” Jesse said, but there was no reproach in his voice. “You meddling kid. I’m sure Dean will love it.”

Ben smiled and sat down on the floor, crossing his legs. “You know you like that about me,” he said to Jesse, with such fondness it felt almost indecent to witness.

He was looking at Jesse with a sort of wistful love that made Claire reconsider the idea that he hadn’t heard them talking. She wondered how he could stand leaving his feelings out in the open for everyone to see. Anyone could come and trampled all over them. It wasn’t the first time she’d had that thought; over the years she’d known him she’d come to be familiar with that look of naked adoration, but even now it still felt a little strange to have it not be directed at her, but to be able to observe it from the outside. She didn’t really mind it, though. What other people seemed to have troubles to grasp—and by other people she mainly meant Katie, the only person bold enough to ask her directly about it—was that as much as Ben and his feelings were precious to her, she also enjoyed being relieved of some of that focus.

They drank their tea—Jesse claimed it tasted like grass, questioning how could anyone drink it for pleasure—and called the Winchesters. When he answered, Sam sounded like he had been expecting their call.

“How’s Dean?” Ben asked before they got down to business. He put Sam on loudspeaker, so Claire and Jesse could follow the conversation.

“Dean’s grumpy,” Sam answered, as if it was somehow a new piece of information. “Castiel flew by.”

“He told you,” Claire said.

“Yes.” There was a silence, as if Sam was weighing whether or not he should ask his next question: “Are you okay? I know death visions are—”

“I wouldn't call it fun. But I’m fine. What do you know about the boy?” There was no need to specify which boy she was speaking about.

Sam cleared his throat. “His name was Adrian Wormwood. He lived with his parents in a small town of Wisconsin, near Salem. A couple of weeks ago a neighbor heard a crash in the middle of the night. Didn’t think much of it at first, but when she went to check on the family the next day, she found that the boy was missing and both parents’ brains had fried. There was no sign of forced entrance.”

“Which there wouldn’t be, if the murderer was an angel.”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you known about this?”

“Not as long as you probably think.” There was a pause and a back and forth of deep rumbles exchanged between Sam and his brother. “Last time you called, we asked Castiel if anything was going on. I guess that with Dean’s health problems— _oh, shut up, Dean_ —he didn’t want to get us involved.”

Ben snorted at that, but he managed to contain the _and how did_ that _feel_ that probably burned his lips.

“Did you know about the fallen angels?” Jesse asked.

“Yes—I mean, Dean knew that it was Castiel’s pet project to look out for them, and he told me about it some time after I woke up. We didn’t really feel concerned by them until now, though.”

“Maybe it’s only a one time occurrence,” Ben hazarded.

New silence. They couldn’t hear any whispers between the brothers, which meant there was probably some form of soundless communication going on.

“Sam?” Ben called. “Sam, if you know something, just tell us. We can help. Claire looks like she has some connection with those kids, we can use that.”

“There was another incident. Bethany Pullman, single mother of triplets, was murdered last night, killed the same way Adrian’s parents were. Brains cooked like deep fried beignets.”

“And one of the triplets is a fallen angel, I imagine,” Claire said.

“All three of them, actually.”

“How are the kids?” Ben asked.

“Fine. Cas took them to a friend of ours in Sioux Falls. They were too shocked yesterday to say anything about their mom’s murder, but we might get something from them if we try again.”

“A friend in Sioux Falls?” Ben smiled. “Bobby Singer?”

Sam laughed. “No, not Bobby. I think Bobby’s had his fill of little kids running around his junkyard with Dean and me.” They heard Dean mumble something that sounded like, _speak for yourself_. “No, Cas handed the kids to Sioux Falls’ sheriff, Jody Mills. He warded the place against angels, so they’re as safe as they can be until we know more about who might be after them.”

“Okay,” Claire said, coming to a decision. “Text us a picture, and Jesse can take us there right now.”

Ben frowned. “Sam,” he said, “Will you excuse us a moment?” Then he signaled Claire and Jesse he wanted to talk away from the phone. Or, it seemed, he wanted to talk to Claire. “Claire, don’t you want to give it a night’s rest?”

She frowned. “What’s a night’s rest going to do? Apart from giving the murderer more time to accomplish whatever he wants?”

“Well, I think _you_ need some of that rest.” He raised a hand to fend off Claire’s protest. “I have no doubt you’re tough as nails, Claire, but it’s still a shock. And it’s not just about you—those kids just lost their mother, they’re away from home with a stranger, and more strangers are going to come and poke at their terrible memories. I think they deserve to be given a night, too.”

Claire pressed her lips and clenched her fists, feeling like her whole body was one giant knot. It felt impossible just to stay and go to bed as normal, but Ben had a point.

“Okay.”

Ben grinned at her then, a blinding expression, like she’d just done him a huge favor. The way his eyes crinkled had Claire’s pulse flitter for a few seconds. He had ridiculously long eyelashes, ones that a lot of girls would kill for.

“Text me the pic, Sam,” he said to the phone. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

\---

Sheriff Mills’ home in Sioux Falls was a prim two-story house with a slated roof topped by a row of three roof windows. Over the porch, an American flag danced lightly to the breeze. When Claire knocked on the door, she was answered almost immediately by a woman with short graying hair and a friendly face, who seemed to be in her late forties-early fifties.

“You must be Sam and Dean’s friends,” she said, smiling. “Come on in.”

She led them to her living room, speaking all the way: “I expected you a little later in the day, as Sam told me you’d come from California.”

They shared a look, and she must have caught it because she said, “I’ve learned when not to ask.”

The living room was dark; the curtains were drawn even though it was the middle of the day. Sheriff Mills pulled at them, explaining with an embarrassed chuckle: “I was taking advantage of the kids’ nap time to take a nap of my own. I’m not used to little kids anymore, and they’re running me to the ground.”

“Sorry,” Claire said, but Jody Mills dismissed the apology with a wave.

Ben was already snooping around, stopping at the mantel of the chimney to get a closer look at the pictures adorning it. He took one of them; from Claire’s vantage point it looked like a family picture, portraying a family of three, including one child.

“My husband and my son,” Sheriff Mills said, and Ben hurriedly put the photo back in place. The tightness around Jody Mills’ eyes was enough of a clue as to where her husband and son were now.

“Guess we don’t have to ask you how you know the Winchesters,” Claire said dryly, and it had the fortunate effect of making Sheriff Mills laugh.

“Yeah, those two have a way to make you both glad and not glad to have ever met them. Anyway.” She directed a small smile at Ben, who looked stricken to have brought up the topic. “It was a long time ago. I wouldn’t say it has ever stopped hurting, but it’s pain I’m well used to dealing with.”

“My parents were murdered six months ago,” Jesse offered. “A demon. So, yeah. I know what it feels like.”

Claire and Ben exchanged a look, surprised that Jesse was willing to tell this much to a complete stranger.

“Nasty fuckers,” Sheriff Mills said sympathetically. “Is this how you met the Winchesters?”

Jesse dropped his head, looking at the tip of his sneakers like the answer to all inquiries could be found there. “Nah,” and his mouth twisted into a wry smile. “We go way back.”

“Apologies. I didn’t mean to pry.” Sheriff Mills raised an apologetic hand. “I ask questions; it’s a professional quirk.”

Jesse shrugged and grinned, a cocksure smile that was mostly a mask and bore little resemblance to his real smile. Sheriff Mills looked about to say something else, but a little voice came down from the stairs that they could see from the open doorway at the back of the room, calling, “Mommy! Mommy!”

A shadow crossed Jody Mills’ face. “I think the triplets are awake.”

“One of them is, at least,” Ben said.

“If one of them is, then all of them are about to be,” Sheriff Mills said wryly. “Believe my short experience. Wait here for a bit. I’ll get them settled and calm enough for a conversation.”

“Take your time,” Claire murmured and Sheriff Mills jogged up the stairs, disappearing from Claire’s field of vision.

After a moment, the sound of feet thumping down the stairs signaled an imminent arrival, and Sheriff Mills reappeared trailing a line of three dark-skinned little kids linked by the hand like a daisy chain. Two of them were girls who both wore their hair in a myriad of little braids with beads at the end of them—one head adorned with red beads, and the other with blue ones.

“Here’s Danny,” Sheriff Mills said, resting a hand on the boy’s head. “Here’s Millie, and here’s Lily. Say hello, kids.”

“Hello,” said the triplets in a dutiful chorus.

Everyone found a seat in Sheriff Mills’ living room, where no piece of furniture matched anything else. Ben pressed a hand to his chest and said to the triplets, “I’m Ben, and these are my friends, Jesse and Claire. We wanted you to answer a few questions. Do you think you can do that?”

Danny and Lily both adopted an expression that said, ‘ _duh_ ’—but Millie’s stony face didn’t let any emotion transpire. It was a bit unnerving to see a little girl with such an expression.

“Okay,” Ben said. “But they’re difficult questions. I want you to tell me about the night before Castiel came to take you here—the last night at your home.”

Now Danny and Lily’s little faces were starting to scrunch in distress. “Mommy,” Lily whined, and Sheriff Mills stroked her hair soothingly. “It’s okay, honey.”

Ben took a deep breath. “You were sleeping, right? You were in your beds. What made you get out?”

“Mommy screamed,” Danny said. “Millie said that maybe she was hurt and we had to help her.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” Millie said in a clear, precise voice, frosty like a winter breeze.

“Who did you see when you got downstairs?”

“A bad man,” Danny said, then squirmed on his seat, sending a look in direction of Millie, like asking for guidance. “He hurt Mommy.”

“He was all shiny!” Lily blurted out. “Like the sun!”

“Shiny,” Ben said. “You mean that he was glowing? Was he shooting light from his hand? Did he have wings too?”

Lily looked uncertain. “Like a bird?”

“Yes!” Danny exclaimed. “Big wings!” He opened his arms as widely as he could to illustrate. “I saw them when he left: they were white—hmm. They were like… made up of light.”

“Light?” Ben said in an undertone, turning to Claire and Jesse. “This isn’t how Dean described angel wings. He said he’d only ever seen them shadowed on a wall.”

“But that’s what they actually look like.” Jesse and Ben both gave Claire a look. “Well, I can see them, of course. That’s part of what being a vessel is.”

They tried to get more from the triplets, but Millie remained stubbornly silent, looking at them with unvarying eyes, and Lily and Danny were unable to tell them anything more about what the man looked like, beyond the fact that he was “big”—which, coming from a pair of five-year-old, didn’t really mean much.

“Danny, Lily,” Millie suddenly said, and her siblings sprung to attention.“Race you back to the room.”

Before any of them had the time to say anything, both kids jumped from their seats and dashed across the room. “No running in the stairs!” Sheriff Mills yelled. She cast a look Millie’s way—the little girl hadn’t moved from her place—then heaved a sigh and followed the kids upstairs.

“You’re not going after them?” Claire said. Millie leveled a serene look at her, a serious, way older-than-her-years expression on her face. It was familiar, too—it was exactly the way Castiel would look at her. “You remember who you are, don’t you?”

“I’m Muriel. Lily’s angel name is Lailah, and Danny’s is Daniel. We made the decision to fall together and got reincarnated as triplets. You’re the runaway’s vessel, aren’t you?”

“My father is,” Claire said stiffly. “I was only possessed once, briefly.”

Millie shook her little head, making the blue beads at the tips of her braids dance. “It doesn’t matter how long it was. Once a vessel—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jesse said, irritated. “Cut the angel bullshit. How come you didn’t say anything earlier?”

Millie looked at him with vague disgust. “You’re the Anti-Christ.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“They’re not aware—Lily and Danny. They don’t remember who they are. They may have been able to see angel wings, but they really have the minds of five-year-old children. They wouldn’t understand.”

“Why didn’t you say anything to Castiel?”

Millie’s look of distaste spoke for itself and Claire felt a twinge of annoyance. Immediately, she was irritated at how instinctive her defensiveness of Castiel was.

“Is it because he’s a runaway?” she couldn’t help but ask. “Isn’t it a bit hypocritical of you?”

“He abandoned us! We put our faith into him, thought he would lead us, and—” Millie took a deep breath and her mask fell back into place. “I wasn’t sure he could be trusted.”

“Okay,” Ben said. “So you remember who you are: how? Why do _you_ remember, and not your siblings?”

“I don’t know.” For the first time, Millie looked hesitant. “I was closer than Lily and Danny were to the one who killed Mom—our mother. Maybe some of the energy he used knocked something loose. I started remembering soon after that.”

“What can you tell us about the angel who killed your mother?”

“I know him—knew him from before, I mean. Even with his vessel I could recognize him.” Millie’s childish mouth twisted in distaste. “He’s a traitor. One of the Adversary's worshippers. His name is Ramiel.”

The name got an instant reaction: Ben and Jesse looked at each other in surprise, and when they looked at Claire they both wore an expression of wry resignation. Claire had always known Ramiel under his angel identity, but Ben and Jesse were more familiar with another name—that of his vessel’s, Ben’s old neighbor.

“Good old Mr. Bennet,” Ben drawled, mouth quirking slightly. “What a twist.”

\---

If you took the time to think about it, it seemed that this was inevitable, really. That was what Claire said when they called the Winchesters to tell them. They’d let Ramiel go then because they’d had more pressing matters—stopping the demons from opening Lucifer’s Cage, saving the world in the process, _saving Jesse_ —but it wasn’t a big surprise that it was now coming back to haunt them. Bite them in the ass, as Ben said. They may have hoped that Ramiel would have been caught by either angels or demons and been killed for his treachery to both, but he couldn’t have survived all these years being a double agent without more than one trick in his bag.

“Do you think he still wants to open the Cage?” Ben asked Sam, glancing worriedly at Jesse. “The rings are gone. The door can’t be opened anymore, can it?” He didn’t need to voice his concern to Claire—or probably to the Winchesters, either—to know what he feared: that Ramiel would try once again to use Jesse for the task. He’d probably be just as nice about it as the demons had been.

“It’s hard to say—” Sam started.

Jesse interrupted him, saying impatiently, “Obviously I’m not the one who’s been kidnapped or murdered, and even if it’s his intention, I say let the bastard try it if he wants. I can take him.”

Claire studied him—his lanky figure, clad in worn-out jeans and a faded t-shirt, his messy hair falling into his eyes, in need of a good haircut. Outwardly he looked as dangerous as a stumbling fawn, but the eerie demonic taint seeping out of him told a different story, and Ramiel would be a fool not to remember it.

“Ramiel may not be after Lucifer’s Cage at all,” she said. “He may have a completely different goal.”

“Seems unlikely,” came Dean’s voice. He sounded like he’d woken up only a short time ago. “Fanatics don’t change their tune that easily.”

“But how does the Leviathan come into play? If what you say is true—” A glance of reproach from Ben at those words, which she chose to ignore. “Then Leviathans are locked in Purgatory. Two things, locked in two different locations. What would be the relation?”

“Maybe he’s trying to free the Leviathans in hope that they can help him break Lucifer out of his Cage,” Jesse suggested, but even as he said it he seemed to know how far-fetched that sounded.

“It doesn’t tell us what he wants with the kids,” Sam said.

“And maybe ‘Leviathan’ doesn’t mean giant sea monsters at all and we’re wracking our heads over nothing,” Dean said, unknowingly echoing what Ben had said before.

“If that kid, as scared and lost as he was, said this word, then it has to mean something,” Claire insisted.

“Not saying it doesn’t; just that it might not mean what we think and that—well, we have no way of asking him about it now, have we.”

That was a blunt reminder of what had happened, and Claire felt like she’d been doused in cold water. Ben watched her with a grimace, looking apologetic on Dean’s behalf. She opened her mouth to say something, not wanting the Winchesters at the other end of the line to realize that she was unsettled, but she heard footsteps come from the stairs and Jody Mills appeared in the doorway. She saw the phone in Ben’s hand, smiled, and in a voice a little louder than for a normal conversation she said, “Hi, Sam! Hi, Dean!”

The brothers produced echoing greetings and Jody Mills’ smile turned into a grimmer expression. “The kids are playing—Millie’s keeping her siblings calm for the moment, but I think that she won’t be able to do it for long. They’re not asking for their mother anymore, so they must have grasped somehow that she’s gone, but they want to see their grandparents. They’re scared, and they don’t understand what’s going on.”

“How did you manage to take them with you, anyway?” Jesse asked. “Aren’t the kids’ grandparents going to show up and demand that they come with them? Or the CPS or something?”

“Bobby did his magic and argued that they needed police protection, and the grandparents are a couple of states away—that’s how he and Castiel have been able to whisk the kids away. But I think it won’t be long before we have an army of lawyers at our doors, wanting more details. Not to mention the CPS.”

“I can help with that,” Jesse said. “Direct them to me and I’ll keep them at bay for you.” Sheriff Mills looked at him curiously and he shrugged. “It’s magic,” he added with a smirk and a wriggle of his fingers.

“Or something,” Dean said, which caused Ben to glare at the phone.

“Do you have to be an ass?” He then shook his head, ignoring the fact that Dean couldn’t see him. “Don’t answer that—what are we doing now? We can protect the kids and keep the family appeased for a while—thanks to Jesse—but what we really need is to find out what Ramiel wants with them.”

“Whatever it is,” Sam said, “he didn’t get it from the first boy. Or maybe he didn’t get enough, but he’s not finished or he wouldn’t have attacked the triplets.”

“I think what he wants is grace.”

Claire had felt him coming but Castiel’s voice startled everyone else in the room and at the Winchesters’. That is, almost everyone, because Jesse’s only reaction was an eye roll.

“Ever heard of knocking?” he said.

“You’re one to talk,” Ben said, before he looked suspiciously at Castiel. “How are you even here, anyway? I thought this place was warded against angels.”

“Bobby Singer made those wards under my guidance. I tweaked them a little so I could be the exception. A sort of… side door, if you will.” The word ‘tweak’ sounded odd in his mouth, like something he’d learned from someone else and was only just trying out.

“What were you saying about grace?” Claire asked, reflexively lifting a hand to press against her ribs.

She rarely paid attention to the bit of grace that Castiel had left behind after possessing her—it was part of her, as much as her organs—but now she thought she could almost feel it, pulsing like a smaller, secondary heart. Was it its reaction to Castiel’s presence that she felt, or was she merely imagining it? She had never noticed it that acutely before.

“I think that what the kidnapper—”

“Ramiel,” Ben supplied.

One of Castiel’s eyebrows twitched. “Oh. Well, I guess it was to be expected. So I think that Ramiel is after the fallen angels’ graces.”

“What for?”

Castiel looked slightly started by Dean’s voice coming from the phone, but he recovered quickly. “Hello, Dean. In answer to your question—grace is power. Whether Ramiel still wants to free Lucifer or has another nefarious purpose, he’ll want power, because he’s a weak angel. But in order to get grace from a fully-empowered angel he would have to fight him or her, whereas he only has to pick up the grace of a fallen angel from wherever it fell.”

“But even after having recovered her memories, Anna still didn’t know where her grace was,” Sam said.

Ben and Jesse looked to Claire with questioning faces— _who's Anna?_ Claire made a little hand wave indicating that she’d explain later.

“Ramiel doesn’t necessarily know that. Or he probably hoped that the kid would be able to lead him to his grace instinctively, which he very may well have done—we don’t know if Ramiel killed him because he’d fulfilled his purpose, or because he’d proved useless to him.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to research any unnatural occurrences, like I did to find Anna’s grace?” Sam said, sounding skeptical.

“You’re thinking like a human,” Castiel said. “It probably never even occurred to Ramiel to proceed that way. He’s very contemptuous of humans.”

Ben huffed. “I’d say.”

“Okay,” Sheriff Mills said suddenly. She’d kept silent since Castiel’s arrival, and Claire wondered just how much she knew of what was going on. “What are we doing now? Is this Ramiel guy going after the triplets? Or will he try to find some of the others?”

“He shouldn’t be able to find the triplets, thanks to the wards, so—”

“She’s right,” Ben said. “If what he wants is grace then it doesn’t matter if he can get to the triplets. He’ll try to take the others.”

“I already went and warded each of their houses,” Castiel said. “I did the same with their schools and daycares.”

“But kids don’t stay at home or at school all day. He can wait them out and follow them until he can catch them when they’re vulnerable.”

“How many of them are there?” Claire asked. “Can we protect them all?”

“There are four more,” Castiel said.

They proceeded to debate over the mathematical problem: four children, and how many to protect them? A heated argument erupted between Sam and Dean over whether Dean was up to being out in the field. Dean, of course, was adamant that he was, and, to press his point, he brought up Sam’s eight-year coma and how Sam had been hunting mere months after waking up. Claire watched out for Castiel’s reaction to this subject, but there was none.

It was decided that Castiel and Jesse could hope to handle Ramiel on their own, but that regular human beings would better work in pairs—so, in order to reach the count, Bobby Singer would have to be roped in. In the end, their plan was that Sam and Dean would watch the three-month-old—the less likely target, which made Dean sputter in indignation. Ben and Bobby would team up, and so would Jesse and Castiel. The latter two would put everyone into position, then each guard one of the remaining children. Claire insisted on staying with Sheriff Mills to keep an eye on the triplets.

“I don’t think Ramiel is going to give up on them that easily,” she argued. “They fell together. It stands to reason that their graces can be found at the same spot. Three for the price of one; I don’t think that Ramiel will be willing to pass that opportunity. So I’d like to stay here. If Sheriff Mills doesn’t mind, that is.”

“Call me Jody,” said Sheriff Mills—Jody. She gave Claire a pat on the shoulder. “I would love the company.”

Castiel disappeared, off to get Sam and Dean, but Ben and Jesse lingered behind a moment to say goodbye. Claire wasn’t much for public demonstrations of affection at the best of times, so now, acutely aware of Jody watching them, she only pressed foreheads with Ben for a mere second and clenched Jesse’s hand in hers. “Don’t get kidnapped,” she told him.

“Got it, princess. I’ll just push Ben in the way.”

“Hey!”

Jesse turned to Jody, weaving his fingers with Ben’s. “Don’t freak,” he warned. “I’m about to make us go poof.”

“You—” Jody shook her head, mouth curving into a smile. “Don’t worry about it. This isn’t exactly my first rodeo and I can put two and two together. I’ve gathered that you’re not completely human. So go right ahead.”

The boys stood shoulder to shoulder; they were about the same height, but being leaner Jesse looked taller when they were standing close to each other like this. A blink of an eye later, they were gone as if they’d never been there. Alone with Jody, Claire caught the woman glancing at her in a way that she couldn’t parse at first. But then she rewound the scene that had just taken place, and—well, none of them had kissed, but there was probably no mistaking that kind of intimacy. She opened her mouth reflexively, but she didn’t know what to say or why she would even feel the need to justify herself.

“We—”

“Hey,” Jody said, raising placating hands. “You don’t have to say anything. I’m not judging. I was only a little—never mind. Would you like a drink?”

“Yes.” In a moment of weakness, Claire pictured the same scene with her mother. “I think I would love a drink.”

\---

She ended up taking a couple of more drinks than she’d expected, but it didn’t seem to affect her too badly, so she allowed herself the indulgence. Jody was pleasant company: she had a quirky sense of humor, sarcastic but without being too cutting, and a solid storytelling sense. She regaled Claire with a few stories from her work as a small town sheriff as well as from her years-long friendship with the Winchesters, and Claire caught herself chuckling a few times.

“Time travel?” she said incredulously at one particularly unbelievable story. “Now you’re pulling my leg. There’s no way Dean has worked with _Elliot Ness._ ”

“Have you met Dean? Of course he’s worked with Eliot Ness! And, hey—angels. The kids upstairs are _fallen angels_. I swear, every time I think I’ve seen it all, the Winchesters prove me wrong.”

“I’m kind of used to angels,” Claire said vaguely, transfixed by the way the light caught the amber liquid in her glass. Her limbs felt loose and heavy, and all her problems seemed to belong to someone else. “But I guess time travel is my line. What surprises me, though, is that Dean kept hunting while Sam was in a coma. I assumed he’d stopped everything to take care of him.”

“Few things can keep Dean from the hunt for very long. But, yeah, those were dark times for him. Losing someone you love is hard, but having them linger for years… Letting go is difficult enough as it is.”

Jody’s eyes flicked to the side, in the direction of the pictures on the mantelpiece. Claire refrained from asking questions. Jody had alluded briefly to her husband and son during the course of their discussion, casual mentions, so it didn’t seem to be a topic Jody shied away from at all costs; still, they didn’t know each other well enough to have a conversation that heavy and personal.

“Anyway, all of this is all behind us now that Sam is better,” Jody said more lightly. “Those boys always bounce back. Dean told me that it was thanks to your—Jesse, is it?”

“Yes, Jesse.” Claire flashed her a quick smile. “And you can say it, I won’t be offended—my boyfriend. One of my boyfriends.”

Jody’s smile turned warm and a little bit teasing. She didn’t look like she found the idea shocking or disgusting, and Claire relaxed further, welcoming the warmth and fuzziness from the alcohol. “I have to admit that I’m a little curious about it, but you seem to be a private person and I didn’t want to push. So two guys, huh? Must be a handful.”

“Sometimes.”

“And are they—”

“Are they what?”

“I mean, they looked… cosy.”

“Oh, you mean, are they involved with each other?” It was the first time she’d talked about this to someone who wasn’t Ben’s friends, but it was strange how easy—how liberating too—it was to say the words. “Yes, that too.”

Jody took a sip out of her glass, eyeing her curiously from over the rim. “You never get jealous?”

“About them being together? No.” She thought she could see doubt in Jody’s expression. “People may find it hard to believe, but it’s the truth. It doesn’t bother me, never has. Quite the contrary, in fact—it gives me time to myself.”

“When you put it that way, well. I can see your point.”

Claire was about to change the subject—she didn’t feel any annoyance at Jody’s curiosity, but felt uncomfortable under the scrutiny—when she heard a crash coming from upstairs, startling her a bit. The buzz she’d been feeling cleared and everything jumped back into focus. Jody must have heard it too, because she put down her glass very carefully, pushed her chair back as she stood, eyes on the ceiling. She instructed Claire to stay put with a silent command and went to retrieve a gun from a drawer. In an instant, she’d changed from a friendly middle-aged woman to a professional on a mission.

When she headed to the stairs Claire trailed after her, but forced herself to stop at the bottom of the staircase, heart pounding, an ear out for any other noise. Maybe it was nothing; maybe one of the triplets had just broken something. She was sure at least that it was impossible for angels to enter the house.

One beat, two beats. She still couldn’t hear anything from upstairs: no fighting noises, no muffled voices, nothing. Her fingernails dug into her palms as her anxiety rose. Having to wait always made time seem to pass slower, but surely it had been at least a couple of minutes and she should have heard something by now—if only the sound of Jody’s voice asking the kids what was going on.

But then— _there_. A sound, at last, something like a stifled cry. Claire clenched her fists, coming to a quick decision. She needed a weapon. She didn’t know Jody’s house, didn’t know whether she had other guns concealed around the place, so she headed for the kitchen and rummaged through the drawers until she found a knife sharp enough for her taste. Then, after a second of reflection, she grabbed a can of table salt from one of the cupboards above the sink.

As she quietly went up the stairs she started to feel something uncomfortable, and it grew until she was able to identify it just as she reached the landing: a gross, oily sensation that clung to her skin like it could physically alter the quality of the air. _Demons_. Only when she came to that realization did she hear other sounds that definitely betrayed a struggle. Her heartbeat sped up and she took a deep, calming breath, preparing herself for the upcoming fight.

The landing opened on a shadowed hallway, two doors on each side and one other door at the end of it, left slightly ajar so that a thin sliver of light pierced the darkness. If demons were in there, then her knife wasn’t going to do a whole lot of good, so Claire tucked it into her belt and fumbled with the salt can to open it.

The journey from the staircase to the open door at the end of the hallway seemed like it took forever, even though it wasn’t more than half a dozen steps away. Claire’s heart was pounding so hard that she could feel each beat reverberate into her ribcage; her hands were sweaty, to the point where she was worried the salt would slip away from her grip. The sounds were getting clearer, and, even though she had trouble hearing through all the noise her heart was making, she could recognize children’s muffled cries of protest. She couldn’t hear Jody’s voice at all, and that single fact worried her most of all.

When she was close enough to the door, she peered inside the room through the crack, trying to get a handle of the situation inside. She could see the end of a bed, covers thrown to the floor, and part of a lean dark-haired woman with hair breaded close to her skull. The woman’s movements were wild and broken, like she was struggling, and when she spun around Claire could see that she was trying to wrestle a panicked five-year-old into submission. Claire didn’t need the flash of ink-like darkness in her eyes to know what the woman was.

“Damn angel brats,” said another voice, male and rough. “How are you doing with yours?”

“Mine’s gonna be a nice girl now,” the woman grounded out. “Aren’t you, honey?”

The kid—probably Lily, although Claire couldn’t see her well enough to tell her apart from Millie—let out a whine, the sound of it hushed by the hand over her mouth. The demon gave her a harsh shake and the little girl fell silent.

“Let’s go,” the female demon said. As Claire debated what to do, the male demon interjected, “What do we do with _her_?”

Claire shifted positions so as to see the wall, and the movement allowed her to finally discover what had happened to Jody: the woman was flattened to the wall, her feet barely reaching the floor, held there by some invisible pressure. Two thoughts flashed through Claire’s mind: first, that Jody wasn’t dead, or she would be crumpled in a heap somewhere on the floor; second, that one of the demons had to be holding her there, which meant that the hold could be broken. From what she could hear it didn’t sound like there were more than two demons in the room, and that made the odds a little bit better, especially since she had the element of surprise.

“Slit her throat,” the female demon said in a dismissive tone, and Claire knew it was now or never.

She threw herself against the door and dashed into the room, aiming for the female demon as the only target she could see. She saw the woman’s eyes widen slightly before she colluded with her, sending them both tumbling to the floor with Lily trapped between them.

“Who the _fuck_ —”

She heard a crash somewhere behind her and knew that Jody had been released from her hold. Before the demon she was keeping trapped against the floor could think of trying to get free, Claire pushed Lily aside and shoved salt into the host’s mouth. The demon choked and coughed, red-faced and black-eyed. Claire thought about that time Jesse had accidentally drunk holy water and the horror of that memory made her stomach flip, but she steeled herself against that first hint of pity. Those things were _nothing_ like Jesse.

Just when the demon’s struggles were starting to weaken, Claire felt strong large hands try to heave her off the floor. Her heart leaped in her chest with panic but she let herself be moved just enough that Lily could wriggle out, then shoved a sharp elbow backward and was met with solid flesh and a choking sound, half pain, half surprise.

Claire rolled on the side so she could face her assailant, a heavy-set man with a crooked nose and beady dark eyes. He went at her again, too close for her to have the range to throw salt at him. She instinctively raised her arms in front of her, trying to shove him away from on top of her, but he batted away her attempts at self-defence and grabbed her shoulders. As his hands inched closer to her neck and she fought to keep him away, Claire’s vision narrowed to the demon’s face, his now demon-black eyes and the broken blood vessels around his nose. Blood pounded in her temples; the demon’s weight crushing her chest made it hard to breathe.

Then the weight was suddenly lifted off her and she didn’t take the time to understand how it had happened, didn’t even take the time to breathe before she blindly threw salt in a wide sweep. Sitting up in a bolt she cast a look around and saw that Jody was the one who had saved her and was now trying to wrestle Claire’s aggressor. Lily was huddled in a corner, whimpering in fear, and Millie stood in front of her, arms spread in a protective stance. Where was Danny? Was he—Claire didn’t have the time to complete that thought because the female demon, recovered from the salt, took advantage of the opportunity to grab Millie.

For a moment that felt like it stretched indefinitely, Claire and Millie locked eyes. Claire was reminded of the little ghost girl they had dispelled a few days ago, her solemn gray eyes before she was burned to nothing. Jody cried out. _Castiel_ , Claire thought desperately, realizing she wasn’t going to be able to help both Jody and Millie, _Castiel, please help me_. Millie shook her head minutely.

“Let’s bail!” the female demon yelled to her companion, one arm coiled around Millie’s neck.

Claire rose to her knees, but, before she could do anything, both demons disappeared, taking Millie along with them. Claire let out a gasp, reaching out for her, but it was already too late.

For a moment, everyone in the room was stunned into silence.

“Jody?” Claire called once she had regained enough air to speak out. She felt frozen, her heart a block of ice. “Are you okay?”

Jody picked herself up from the floor, wiping at blood above her left eye. “I’m fine,” she said in a rough voice. “I—”

A wailing broke the tension and Jody rushed to Lily, just as Danny crawled from under one of the beds. Jody scooped them both in her arms, murmuring soothing nonsense to them, rocking them like babies. Not even a second later, right in the spot where the female demon had stood with Millie, Castiel materialized, dishevelled and his clothes in disarray.

“What—” he started, but then his eyes fell on where Jody huddled with the little ones and his face darkened.

“Demons,” Claire said, still feeling a little dazed. “They took Millie. Why didn’t we expect demons? Ramiel has worked with them before. Why—”

“Demons also tried to take the child I was watching over. She’s fine, though, and those particular demons won’t be a problem anymore.”

_Why didn’t I call Castiel sooner?_ Was it misplaced pride? No, because it hadn’t even occurred to her before it was too late. Being unable to admit to her own helplessness, that was her downfall. Maybe that feeling found its roots in the fact that she could remember a time when she had not been helpless at all, when she had been the opposite of it even, bursting with power to the brim, unstoppable.

_Stop it._ It was silly to think about something that wasn’t going to happen again, and even sillier to embellish the memory so much.

She heaved herself to her feet. Castiel made a move to help her out, but she was already up and she waved him off.

“Claire—”

“I’m fine,” she said. He backed off, going to Jody and the kids instead.

Claire let Jody relate to him what had happened in a hushed voice, turning her back on them for an illusion of privacy. She fished her phone from her pocket, wasted a few seconds wondering if she should call Ben or Jesse first, and settled on Jesse—he could come here in a second, pick Ben up on the way if needed—but her phone started ringing on its own accord.

“Yes?”

“You okay?” There was a relieved tinge to Jesse’s voice, and it could only mean one thing.

“Are _you_ okay?” she asked him, her heartbeat picking up again even though all evidence pointed to Jesse being perfectly fine. “Something happened, didn’t it? Demons?”

“Yeah. You too?”

“They took Millie. Lily and Danny are fine, though. What about you?”

“The kid’s fine. I, ah, sent the demons back to Hell. Ben’s fine too,” he added before she could formulate the question. “Everyone’s okay, but it sounds like we were all victims of a coordinated demon attack.”

And only Claire had managed to lose one of her charges. She swallowed back the bitterness, not wanting to make this about her.

“We’ll need to add new wards against demons,” she said instead.

“On it already. That’s not going to be enough,” Jesse said in a lower, darker voice. “They’re going to try again.”

“But maybe having gotten their hands on Millie will tie them up for a while. It might give us time to be more proactive.”

She had sounded so matter-of-fact about it that she had a moment of profound disgust with herself. Jesse, however, didn’t sound shocked by her practicality. In a soft voice he said, “We’ll be here soon. Sit tight.”

She wanted to say _hurry up, I need you here_ , but held herself back.

“Alright,” she said. “Jody and I will take care of warding the house against demons.”

Ben would have ended that conversation with a _love you_ , but Jesse merely reiterated that they would be seeing each other soon. Claire was grateful for the lack of sentimentality, because it wasn’t what she needed now, when she was trying so hard to hold it together. A touch of gentleness, and she might have found herself crumbling into it, in a way that, right now, she couldn’t afford.

\---

They made a quick work of warding the house after Jody had put the kids to sleep. Both children were exhausted, and Jody was good enough at making them feel safe in spite of what had happened that it took much less time than Claire had thought for them to fall asleep. They also seemed to like Castiel, unexpectedly—or maybe it wasn’t so unexpected— and reached out for him once they were in their beds until he awkwardly kissed them on the forehead. The scene put a melancholic look on Jody’s face.

Working on something concrete made Claire feel significantly better, able to push past her own exhaustion. It also gave her time to think back to what had happened and see through her own feeling of inadequacy. Maybe there was something she could have done to prevent Millie from being taken, or maybe not, but, as she remembered the scene, she increasingly felt that the little girl had let herself be kidnapped. And there was a sound reasoning behind it: it had saved her brother and sister from the same fate, got Ramiel and the demons off her fellow fallen angels for a little while at least, and it also—

Claire was distracted from her thoughts by the sound of someone clearing their throat. She turned around: Ben and Jesse stood in the middle of the living room, holding hands, Ben looking a little green. Claire’s heart fluttered wildly at the sight of them. All other considerations fled from her mind, and, taking advantage of the fact that both Jody and Castiel were in another part of the house, she flung herself at the boys.

“Hey,” Ben said, catching her by the waist and burying his face in the crook of her shoulder. “Glad to see you too.”

The three of them remained entwined for a moment, Ben breathing wetly against her neck and Jesse with his nose in her hair, taking deep breaths like he wanted to relearn her scent. They only separated when they heard someone walking down the stairs: it was Jody, followed closely by Castiel.

“We are now safer here than in Fort Knox,” Jody said with a wan smile. “Thank you,” she said to Castiel, who nodded at her in response.

“We’d better get back home,” Jesse said, but he looked tired, and it seemed that Jody had picked up on it too because she said, “You can stay for the night. I have enough room, and—” She gave them a sly smile “—I assume you three don’t mind sharing.”

Ben flushed a bright red, but Jesse looked nonplussed by the comment. “Oh, it’s fine,” he said innocently. “I can take them back home. What’s one more trip, right?”

Claire didn’t outwardly react to the statement, because, if Jesse was too tired, he shouldn’t feel forced to transport them, but inside she felt herself go slack with relief: she really wanted to be somewhere familiar right now.

“Okay,” Jody said pleasantly, then asked Castiel, “Are you staying here?”

He was, and it gave them the last incentive to go back home without having to worry about Jody having to protect the kids on her own if the demons decided to come back and finish the job. Jesse took Ben and Claire’s hands, and, as Claire closed her eyes, she felt the dizzying weightlessness characteristic of Jesse’s teleportation. It was a little nausea-inducing, but she kind of liked the feeling—for a few seconds she felt like she could lift off the ground like a balloon.

She heard swearing and half-smiled before she opened her eyes. Not everyone liked travelling this way, and Ben was a particularly bad case.

“You’d think it would get easier,” he grumbled, face pale as a sheet. “I don’t understand how you can do it with a smile, Claire.”

“It’s fine,” she said. She wouldn’t mock him so if she didn’t know from experience he would quickly start feeling better; already, some color was coming back to his cheeks. “I even sort of enjoy it.”

“You,” he pointed a dramatic finger at her. “I renounce you.”

She reached across Jesse, who was still holding both of their hands and watching them argue with an amused look, and took Ben’s other hand to pull him to her and kiss him, squashing Jesse between them in the process.

“No, you don’t,” she said in a breath once she broke the kiss.

He smiled against her lips. “No, I don’t. The flesh is weak.”

They were still all holding hands, standing close to each other and breathing in sync, and none of them seemed inclined to move.

“Shall we go to bed?” Jesse asked.

“It’s still early,” Claire protested. Her head swam with exhaustion, but she was wound too tight to rest.

“Who’s said anything about sleep?” he said with a roguish smile of the sort she hadn’t seen on his face in a long while.

Ben looked hesitant. “Maybe Claire doesn’t—”

“Claire does,” she said firmly, giving his hand a strong squeeze.

She didn’t want to think about anything, and this needed no thoughts. Want burned in her chest and she became sharply aware of Ben’s and Jesse’s body heat, of the brush of their skins on her bare arms.

She led them both by the hand up to Ben’s room. They fell in a heap onto his bed, touching, caressing and kissing in turns, and quickly, her tiredness lifted up. They had that kind of three-way making-out down pat now, knew how not to bump into each other and how not to leave anyone out. Today it was a little different, both boys focusing on her more than on each other: Ben nipping at the skin over her collarbone; Jesse behind her, brushing her hair away to kiss the back of her neck. She knew she should just let herself enjoy it—and she did, definitely—but she felt uncomfortable with that level of focus on her and ended up pushing them both away, asking them to stop.

“I’m fine,” she said quickly, riding over whatever words of concern Ben was about to utter. “You don’t have to—Okay, if I’m reading this right, we’re doing what I want tonight, aren’t we?”

“Anything you want,” Ben said with the eagerness of a puppy.

“Right,” she said, feeling a small surge of adrenaline. “Then I want you to kiss. Each other, I mean.”

Ben and Jesse shared a look, a little puzzled on Ben’s side. Jesse shrugged and said, “Eh, well, you’re not too shabby, mate. I’m game if you are.”

Ben rolled his eyes at him, then said to Claire, “So you wanna watch, hmm?”

She smiled and nodded encouragingly. The truth was that she didn’t have the same voyeuristic streak that Ben did and didn’t like watching quite as much, but it was a reason he would buy and she didn’t know how to explain the urge to watch them kiss.

“Tick, tock,” she said, and Jesse grabbed Ben by his t-shirt and pulled him flush against him.

“You heard the lady,” he said.

He pressed their mouths together, his fist still knitted in the fabric of Ben’s shirt. Ben’s reaction was a strangled moan and one of his hands fluttered before he settled it on Jesse’s hip. Claire watched them get into it, feeling her own arousal grow steadily in waves, until she couldn’t just watch and had to interrupt them. She had them rock-paper-scissor which one of them would do her, and Ben won.

“Get me ready,” she told Ben, cupping his cheek with her hand as he _looked_ at her—looked at her in a way that was so familiar and yet that she still couldn’t comprehend after all these years. “Get _him_ ready,” she said to Jesse, and ignored the way her voice caught in her throat for no reason.

Experience had taught them that threesome sex was like a dance that needed a careful choreography, and after a few minutes of negotiations they made it work with Claire straddling Ben’s face and Jesse’s between Ben’s legs.

“It feels kind of unfair,” Ben said breathlessly as he took a break, hands gripping Claire’s thighs tightly. “Feels like it’s all about me right now. Should be—”

“Shut up and get to work,” she said, reaching out behind her to brush over Jesse’s hair.

Jesse sucked dick with an enthusiasm she’d never quite been able to muster herself and Ben was starting to unravel under his ministrations, having to take more and more frequent breaks from eating Claire out, muffling moans in the creak between her thigh and stomach, until he finally begged for mercy and they all fumbled to change positions.

“Doing okay?” Ben asked Claire as he propped her propped up against the headboard. He was red and sweaty, radiating heat, almost as much as Jesse on a normal day.

“Yes.” She leaned in to give him a kiss. “More than okay.”

She cradled him in her arms, wrapping her legs around his hips as he buried himself inside her. She closed her eyes, feeling his lips graze her neck, his breath warm and moist on her skin. He went slow at first, careful with her as always even though he knew she wouldn’t break, knew just how much she could take.

“Don’t hold back,” she said, cupping the back of his neck. “Please, I want to feel—”

When he started in earnest she opened her eyes to be able to see him, his wide eyes and his half-open mouth, his dark hair curling and clinging to his forehead from the sweat. He held her eyes and, for a moment, he filled her entire vision field and there was no one else in her world, but the illusion broke when his breathing hitched and his eyes shut tight suddenly. He pressed the crown of his head under her chin, his rhythm momentarily going staccato as Jesse rose from above his shoulder, replacing him as Claire’s focus.

“Hey there,” he said, his smile wide and smug.

“You look pretty happy with yourself.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

His cheeks were flushed and his eyes sparkled; something came alive in Claire’s chest at seeing him like this.

“Why not, indeed,” she said.

It was an uneasy balance, having the three of them joined together that way, and Claire would have regretted the interruption in Ben screwing her if not for that flash of genuine pleasure on Jesse’s face and the way Ben was trying to bite back sounds, shaking a little in Claire’s arms. They had to wiggle around a bit, trying to find a comfortable position for everyone. Jesse braced himself against the headboard with an arm so his weight wouldn’t rest completely on Ben’s back. “Ready for it, mate?” he whispered to Ben’s ear, and it was the only warning either of them got before he started thrusting in earnest.

Jesse wasn’t brutal, but he wasn’t overly careful either, and it took a moment before Ben could do anything but take it, his face pressed against Claire’s as she soothingly stroke his hair and the back of his neck, feeling the repercussions of Jesse’s shoves as if he were fucking her himself. Then Ben started pushing back against Jesse then into Claire, and the three of them were like a mythological monster, a chimera with three heads and twice as many arms and legs, struggling with itself in a wild dance. Claire and Jesse met at odd moments for uncoordinated kisses that they couldn’t keep for long.

The boys came within seconds of each other, Ben muffling a curse against Claire’s shoulder, and Claire bit her lower lip through her own climax. They crumpled over each other and none of them moved for a few minutes, but, eventually, Ben and Jesse’s combined weights became too much for Claire to bear. She had to push at them before they deigned moving. She slipped out to the bathroom, both to clean up and to have a minute to herself. Sex was fantastic, making her feel alive and connected, more aware of her body than she usually was, but it also made her feel just a little too vulnerable, a bit out of control. That was more frightening than she would ever admit to anyone.

When she returned to the room, she thought she’d find Ben and Jesse snuggling, but Jesse was standing by the window wearing only a t-shirt, while Ben, still on the bed, was looking at him with undisguised worry. Claire reached for her discarded clothes, watching Jesse. He was staring fixedly outside, but the window didn’t offer much in the way of a view, only windows and balconies from the nearby building. Some windows were lit up but the balconies were empty—dusk was settling in and it wasn’t warm enough yet to keep the windows open and have people chat on the balconies. Jesse was tense, fingers running a little feverishly over the seams of his t-shirt. Walking around the room he did the same to Ben’s desk chair and a few other objects in the room, mapping it out like a blind man.

“It’s fine,” he said, not looking at them, his back too straight. “Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“It won’t,” Ben said gently. “You’re not sleeping. This isn’t a nightmare that’s going to turn a nice moment into hell.”

This time Jesse half-turned, just enough that Claire could see his face, could see that he was trying for a smile. “I’m not sure that being awake guarantees that things won’t go to shit,” he said, but he seemed to be relaxing a little. “We don’t have a great track record on that.”

“Okay.” Ben unfolded and slid off the bed, obviously finding it safe to approach Jesse now. “Then find comfort in the fact that, if something bad happens now, it’ll be real.”

“You’re a shitty comforter,” Jesse mumbled, but he let Ben draw him into his arms.

“What triggered it?” Claire asked, crossing her arms over her stomach, feeling a little out of place.

“I don’t know.” Jesse shot her a wry smile over Ben’s shoulder. “Too much of a good thing at once, maybe.”

“I’d hate to have to ban sex,” Ben said.

“Well, nothing stops you and Claire from doing each other.”

Ben shoved at him. “You’re such a romantic.”

With that quip the moment was broken, and, if Ben kept shooting Jesse careful looks as if to make sure he really was fine, none of them said anything about it. This was just the way Ben was—he worried. He cared. And, as if to underscore that fact, Ben focused on Claire next, pinning her with a gentle look once they were all in bed again.

“You did what you could. Today, I mean.”

Claire stiffened. “Yes.” Had she? But wondering about it now wouldn’t do Millie any good. “I think she wanted to be taken. I think she—”

She hadn’t let herself think much about why Millie would have wanted this, beyond the immediate benefit of getting the threat away from her siblings. But—of all the fallen angels, Millie was the only one, as far as they knew, who remembered her true self. She knew who she was and she knew who Claire was. Adrian, the boy who’d died, had been lost, confused, had stumbled onto his connection with Claire without knowing what to do with it. Which meant—

Claire sat up in the bed like a shot, sending the bedcover flying.

“Claire?” Ben asked worriedly, while on the other side of him Jesse mumbled sleepily, “Wha—?”

“She’s going to try to contact me.”

“Who is?”

“ _Millie_. She let herself be taken on purpose because she’s aware enough that maybe she’ll be able to have a real conversation with me, pass information.”

“Why contact you and not Castiel, though?”

Claire paused then, trying to think past the excitement that made her heart pace like a galloping horse. She remembered Millie’s look right before she was kidnapped; it really felt like she had tried to pass some sort of message there, and at the time Claire had thought she was merely trying to tell her not to act rashly.

“She looked at me and—Maybe if I expect it it’ll be easier for her. Maybe the fact that we’re both humans and only somewhat angel, whereas Castiel is pure angel, will make the connection easier. Or maybe she’s just that mistrustful of him.” She flopped back on the bed. “I need to fall asleep.”

Ben’s warm hand stroked over her bare arm. “You need to relax. You won’t fall asleep if you’re tense like this.”

“I know,” she said, and she heard the impatience in her voice even before he chuckled and pointed out, “You’re just proving my point, you know.”

Jesse wasn’t saying anything, so he had probably fallen asleep. Lucky him, she thought, until she remembered guiltily just how little sleep he got on a daily basis, and how much he needed whatever scrap of it he could get.

“What would you have me do?” she asked Ben in a frustrated whisper, trying not to wake Jesse up in case he really was sleeping.

“Just relax, it’s not that hard.” They were both whispering now. Ben scooted closer to her, looping an arm over her waist. “Let it go. Give in to me.”

“You’re sounding like a cult guru.”

Another chuckle, sending puffs of air against her cheek. “I’m going to sing you to sleep.”

And he did; old Beatles songs, Metallica and AC/DC—Dean’s influence, most probably—childish lullabies, and current pop songs that she had only a vague awareness of. He sung until his words merged into each other and made no sense, leaving only the deep rumble of his voice to lead her to sleep.

\---

The dream, at first, felt like a regular dream. It was cold and damp and a fine drizzle was descending on her, making it feel like she was breathing chilly water. It was dark, but she couldn’t tell whether it was night or the lid of charcoal-gray clouds was just that thick.

Then she could hear words, snippets of a conversation that was reaching her as though through a radio with very bad reception: _when… promise… enough… more…_

The voice was vaguely familiar, but, as she was trying to place it, _something_ moved in front of her and—She was standing facing a wide lake, or maybe the ocean because there was only water as far as the eye could see. She didn’t know if she had been there all along and hadn’t realized it because the gray waters merged seamlessly with the gray sky. The surface of the lake rippled and swelled, and rose like a mountain was growing from the bottom, water streaming from it as it surged up, dark and gigantic and _alive._

She couldn’t breathe. _You don’t scare me!_ yelled the voice from before, suddenly crystal clear, but _she_ was scared and not stupid enough to deny it. The live mountain was so big that at first all that registered was one huge mass, still dripping with water, cut out against the dark gray sky. It moved sinuously, leaving a dark trail behind it where part of its body was still hidden under water. It screeched and then she could see a mouth, rows of sharp and pointy teeth barring its access like a chain of mountains. Details could now be made out: its belly was a clearer gray, almost white by contrast, and on what she could see of the rest of its body the skin looked cracked and crevassed, covered in bumps and craters like the surface of the moon. It had two appendices, some sorts of fins maybe, that flapped on both its sides, sending water in the air.

The creature screeched again but this time it wasn’t just a noise that pierced her eardrums, but sound with meaning, a message that didn’t use language the way she understood it but that she could still perceive loud and clear.

_Angels_ , it said.

Claire woke up with her heart in her throat. She didn’t think she’d made a sound but both Ben and Jesse were instantly awake with her, Jesse with a choked out noise, fighting for breath as he often did since the mare.

“What the fuck was that?” Jesse asked tensely, a hand pressed against his chest. 

“You—Did you see it?” He had never reacted to any of her dreams before.

“I heard you gasp,” Ben offered. “I guess you had a new dream. Millie?”

“I didn’t see anything,” Jesse said, overlapping with Ben. “But I felt something. It felt distinctly angel-like,” he added, sounding clearly disgruntled at the fact.

Millie had to be so much stronger than the boy had been for Jesse to feel the difference, Claire thought absently. She sat up, and felt Ben follow suit like she was pulling at him with a string.

“It was probably Millie,” she said, thinking back to what she’d seen in a clinical way she’d been unable to reach with her previous dreams. “But I didn’t _see_ her, I think I—I think I saw what she was seeing.”

“What was she seeing?”

_A monster_ , some childish part of Claire answered, maybe the part of Millie that was still a human child and couldn’t process what she had seen. But in the moments between her vision and waking up, Claire’s adult mind had connected the dots and come up with a label for that monstrosity.

“The Leviathan,” she said. “Or _a_ Leviathan, at least, although I sure hope there isn’t more than one of those things out there. Someone—Ramiel, most probably—was talking to it and… It sounds rather crazy, but I think that the Leviathan is the, um, the brain of the operation. It’s pushing Ramiel to capture the angels.”

“What for?” Ben asked. “Does it want grace too?”

“Maybe it wants to rule all things fishy,” Jesse suggested.

Claire could see the monster in her mind as clearly as if she were still facing it. It had seemed impossibly huge to her, but she had to remember that she’d been looking at him from the perspective of a small child. The air hadn’t felt salty, so the water she’d seen probably wasn’t the ocean but rather a lake.

“If it managed to slip by through the Purgatory door when Castiel had it open, it couldn’t have been the size it is now.”

“Monster on angel steroids,” Ben groaned. “Lovely.”

When Claire managed to get back to sleep, her head pillowed on Ben’s shoulder, her last thought was for Millie, cold and damp, facing a giant sea monster.

\---

“I started looking for potential grace spots,” Sam explained. “Anna’s was a giant oak tree that sprouted in the space of a year in Kentucky. Witnesses spoke a shooting star the night of her fall, so I’ve been looking for odd reports of shooting stars and occurrences of abnormal plant growths.”

They were at the Winchesters’, crowding around the coffee table where Sam had his laptop. The bay window was open on the back yard, letting a soft breath of warm air slip inside. Facing his brother in a chair by the empty fireplace, Dean squinted like a man who needed glasses but hadn’t gotten as far as admitting it. There were faint lines of old pain around his eyes and mouth, but he seemed to be feeling fine at the moment, if a tad cranky—but then it didn’t make a big difference from Dean as Claire had always known him.

She wondered where Castiel was, if he was out there looking out for the kids. The thought kept nagging at her like the pinprick pain of a needle’s sting, and she felt annoyed at herself for it.

“I’ve found a couple of trees that match those criteria,” Sam went on. Ben, sitting to Claire’s right on the battered couch, looked deeply interested, while Jesse, to her left, seemed about to fall asleep. “But that doesn’t account for the number of fallen angels we have, so I had to review my criteria a bit. In the end I’ve found a dozen or so weird occurrences that could be explained by a sudden showering of grace: water of a spring that gained healing properties overnight, a house that seems to keep forming new rooms in a way that mystifies the owners, plants that changed colors or started shining, and even something that people swear is a talking tree.”

“We’ll have to keep on eye on those spots, see if our old buddy Ramiel get there,” Dean said.

If Ramiel got there, it would mean that he had found Millie’s grace and had no more use for her. Claire would rather not to think about the possibility.

“What’s Castiel doing?” she asked before she could help herself.

Dean shot her a shrewd look. “Checking on the baby angels.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I don’t think we can keep an eye both on the kids and on the potential grace spots, and then hope that Ramiel himself is just going to show up and not send his demons cronies again,” Ben said.

“Ben’s right,” Sam said. “We’re stretched very thin, and Ramiel is apparently being cautious about involving himself.”

“What’s he trying to do, anyway?” Jesse asked. He looked wide awake now, and more than a bit uncomfortable. “Do you think he’s going to try and open Lucifer’s Cage again?”

“We wouldn’t let it go that far,” Ben promised hotly, and the protectiveness made Jesse smile even though all three of them knew that Jesse could take care of himself.

“We need to look for the Leviathan,” Claire said. “He seems to be the one… in control, I guess? Or at least at the origin of the whole plan.”

Dean snorted. “An angel in cahoots with a giant sea monster. Sounds like the start of a bad joke. But finding that beast is one thing—what do we do when we know where it is?”

“The Lord with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea,” Claire murmured.

“What,” Dean said, at the same time Sam was saying, “It’s from the Bible, right?”

“Isaiah 27:1,” Claire confirmed. “That sword, do you think it might—”

The wash of warmth she associated with Castiel swooped over her one second before he actually materialized in the middle of the Winchesters’ living room.

“Hello,” he said a split second too late to be natural, as if only remembering what he was supposed to say; if he was surprised by Claire and the boys’ presence, he didn’t let any of it show on his face.

“Hi, Cas,” Sam said, not diverting his eyes from his computer screen.

“How are things?” Dean asked.

It never failed to amaze Claire how nonchalant the Winchester brothers were with Castiel, like they were just regular friends meeting for a barbecue. No Heaven, no Hell, no Apocalypse. No pesky matter like Claire’s father body being used as naturally as ordinary people step in their shoes.

“The children are fine,” Castiel said. “For now.”

Sam took upon himself to explain Claire’s dream about the Leviathan. “According to Claire,” he said, “the Bible mentions a sword being used by God to kill the Leviathan. Is that sword among the angelic weapons your friend Balthazar stole?”

Dean winced, and Sam seemed to realize he’d said something he shouldn’t have because he tore his eyes from his computer to meet with his brother’s. “Uh,” he said, turning to Castiel with an apologetic look on his face.

Ben shared a look with Claire that said, _what the hell_ , and Claire shrugged. The name Balthazar rung a bell as an angel Castiel had been friendly with, but she didn’t know why he seemed to be a sore point for him.

“Yes,” Castiel said, his voice clear and precise in the awkward silence that had settled. “The angelic weapons indeed include a sword that may very well be able to kill the Leviathan.”

“Okay,” Dean said, watching his friend with caution. “And do you have any idea where—”

“I’m not sure. I am sure it’s not among the weapons Balthazar gave back to me, but I know a number of Balthazar’s hiding places that I could check.”

“You do that,” Sam said, looking relieved by Castiel’s non-reaction to the name of his friend. “I’ll look for possible locations for the Leviathan. A gigantic sea serpent shouldn’t be too difficult to find. You said you thought it was in a lake, right, Claire?”

“Yes. But I don’t know if this lake is even in the US.”

“If the Leviathan escaped when Purgatory was open,” Sam sneaked a covert glance at Castiel, “then it’s likely it’s still on the continent. It would’ve gone for the closest patch of water.”

“I’ll look for the sword,” Castiel said. Then, unexpectedly: “Claire, would you come and help me?”

For a moment, she didn’t know how to answer that. What could he possibly need her for? She had never met this Balthazar, was no expert at finding divine monster-killing swords.

“We can help too,” Jesse said over her silence. “I mean, if you don’t mind us.”

“Yes,” Castiel said, nodding along. “If I give you some of the locations, we could split up and cover more ground. Thank you for your offer.”

Ben and Jesse shared a look that Claire had no trouble deciphering: this wasn’t what Jesse had wanted to suggest; he’d wanted to be there as an emotional support for Claire in case she needed it, and she felt warmed by the knowledge. At the same time, she understood in a flash that Castiel wanted to be alone with her, and she couldn’t help but wonder why.

“This is a good idea,” she said, standing up to join Castiel. “I’ll go with Castiel, you two go together, and I’m sure we’ll find this sword in no time.”

She tried to communicate with her eyes that she was okay with it and they didn’t need to worry. It seemed to work on Jesse, because he shrugged and said, “Sounds like a plan.” Ben, for his part, held her eyes a little longer, as if checking on any hidden distress. She repressed a fond eye-roll of exasperation; she would have found it more annoying, that protectiveness of his, if he hadn’t been the exact same way with Jesse. At least she knew it wasn’t a reflection on her ability to take care of herself.

She took Castiel’s hand, signaling him she was ready to go. Ben and Jesse positioned themselves in a mirror image, holding hands too in preparation for the jump. Castiel gave them a few addresses, from all over the country and even outside of it.

“Are they all Balthazar’s hiding places?” Dean said with a low whistle. “Guy’s been busy.”

“Only the ones I know about,” Castiel said.

“Well, good luck.”

Claire smiled at Ben and Jesse. Ben was still frowning a little, looking a bit put upon, but Jesse returned her smile. “I’ll look after him,” he told her playfully, nudging at Ben to get him to react. “Bring him back home safe to you.”

“Hey,” Ben said, his voice pitched in indignation. “I’m not a puppy or—”

The rest of his sentence was cut short by Jesse teleporting them before he could finish it. Castiel and Claire didn’t waste any time leaving. Being transported by Castiel didn’t feel much different from doing it with Jesse, but it was still a little less jarring. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was doing it on her own power.

They appeared under a bright blue sky studded with light fluffs of clouds, in an alley bordered by rows of iron blinds painted red. Storage lockers, most probably. Claire’s first thought was that it was an oddly human sort of hiding place.

“Balthazar took on the human ways very quickly.”

Claire almost startled at the sound of Castiel’s voice. Had she spoken out loud? Or was she just that transparent to him?

“Do you really hope to find the sword here? Do you think your friend would have left it just hanging around, gathering dust in a storage locker?”

“The fact that it sounds so improbable should make it a good hiding place, doesn’t it?” Castiel sighed. “But no, I don’t really expect the sword to be here. One must be thorough, though, and Balthazar had a way of surprising you.”

“Well. You’re the one who knew him.”

She took a sharp breath in, wanting to say something else but finding she didn’t have enough air to do it. Her heartbeat sped up and she cursed herself for her uncontrolled nervousness. It was Castiel—she knew him inside and out, quite literally. It wasn’t as if she had anything to fear from him. But then again, it was _Castiel_ , and no one had wrecked her life more thoroughly than he’d done.

“Tell me,” she said, and she’d been afraid before she spoke that her voice would tremble, but it didn’t. “What you wanted to say. Why you insisted that I go with you and send Ben and Jesse off somewhere else.”

Castiel never looked very cheerful, but the gravity on his face at that moment didn’t do anything for Claire’s nerves.

“I may have to ask something of you,” he said. “Something that I promised I would never ask and yet I find myself in a position where I might not have much choice. You can say no, of course.”

Claire’s breath caught in her throat. Intuitively she knew what he was alluding to, but she needed to hear it from him. “What is it?”

“If it comes down to it, we may have to fight Ramiel and the Leviathan. I’m not very worried about Ramiel, as I am fairly confident that I can take him again as I have in the past, but the Leviathan—They are my Father’s oldest creations, dating from long before my kind came into being. I have never even seen any of them myself. I’m not sure what to expect, but I fear fighting that creature might be beyond my abilities in… my current vessel.”

“So you would—You would let go of my father, take me in his place? Is that what you’re saying?”

She had asked it of him before, and he’d always said no, claiming he’d promised her father, and she’d resigned herself to it but now—

“Claire.” Castiel’s normally marble features morphed into something pained. “No—not exactly. You father—there really isn’t anything left to let go of.”

“What—What do you mean?”

“Your father is dead.” As she wasn’t saying anything, he went on, “He has died, and I have been able to continue to use him but if I do take you as a vessel, he won’t be anything more than a dead body. And I intend to go back to him once we’re done. I told you before, I promised Jimmy—”

“Don’t,” she said, and he broke off.

She turned away from him, keenly aware that, whatever she was feeling, whatever the turmoil she felt roaring inside her could be called, it was probably painted all over her face. She didn’t want him to see it. All these years, she’d held onto that one thing: that what had happened to her father had some sort of meaning. Even if she couldn’t see it quite clearly, even if it wasn’t designed by the God she’d been told had up and abandoned His creation to power-hungry angels. She’d been raised to believe that everything had a purpose, and she’d never been strong enough to let go of that belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. Her father had been taken away from her but he had a _purpose_ , and she would take over one day—she tried not to think too much of her more selfish reasons, of that awful longing that never went away—and her father would eventually be free. But she now knew that it would never happen; her father was gone and Castiel had known all along.

“Why didn’t you—” It was hard to talk past the lump blocking her throat. “Why did you never tell me?”

“I thought you knew. I assumed—”

“How could I know if you never told me?” Her anger was like a wild animal, trying to claw its way out of her ribcage.

“Everything my vessel went through, he could never have survived—”

“I thought you could heal your vessel!”

“Not if the vessel is entirely destroyed! Your father’s soul—has moved on. I’m sorry, Claire.”

She reached out and touched his sleeve, feeling the weather-worn material of the trench coat under her fingers. “This is just an empty shell, then.”

Castiel looked about to say something else—undoubtedly some meaningless words—but she raised a hand to stop him. “Let’s do what we came here for, okay?”

Castiel led them along the identical red blinds and stopped in front of one them, undistinguishable from the others save from the number above it: 427. Claire expected Castiel to produce a key to open it, but the angel merely pressed a hand over the surface of the blinds, fingers spread.

“I deactivated the wards,” he explained, catching Claire’s look. Then he bent over to push the blinds open.

“It wasn’t locked?” Claire said.

“Of course it was,” Castiel answered, sounding like locks were an inconsequential matter—and for him, they probably were.

Sunlight followed their entrance and spilled over the items stacked inside the long narrow room: boxes piled over each other, most of them with some kind of symbol painted or engraved on it—Claire recognized some Enochian, but others looked completely unfamiliar—objects coming in various shapes and forms wrapped in sheets, pieces of furniture, bocals filled with liquid in which unidentified things floated.

Castiel zig-zagged in between the clutter like he’d done it a million times and could have maneuvered in here blind. Claire followed him with less ease, bumping her shins and elbows in everything, her eyes searching the shadows for something sword-shaped.

“It’s not here,” Castiel said after a moment; she didn’t ask him how he could be so sure.

“Okay. Then let’s—”

There was a noise outside, but it wasn’t the reason she cut herself off—it was rather because of the way the hair on her arms suddenly stood up, her skin crawling with an all too familiar feeling.

She looked over at Castiel—she didn’t need to ask him whether he’d felt the demonic presence too because, if _she_ had, he probably had too, ten-fold. He nodded minutely at her and took her hand. In a matter of a second, they had left the storage locker and were now in a street, probably in a different town and even in a different state, because it was cold and drizzly and the sky was a dull shade of brownish gray.

“What were they doing here?” Claire asked, looking around with feverish paranoia. “Were they following us? _How?_ Oh God, we left the storage door unlocked!”

“There was little in there that would interest them or that they could use. As to how they knew where we were—”

“Maybe you’re not the only one who was privy to your friend Balthazar’s secrets.”

She didn’t think she’d sounded harsh or accusatory; in fact, she’d very consciously worked on her self-control so she wouldn’t sound anything but neutral. Castiel still flinched almost imperceptibly at his friend’s name. She could see it for what it was, now: guilt. Whatever had happened between Castiel and his friend must have not been pretty, but she found that she couldn’t muster any curiosity about it.

“Ramiel didn’t know Balthazar that well.” He sounded fairly confident about it.

“Maybe Millie did, then,” Claire said, her stomach clenching uncomfortably at the thought of what the little girl was probably going through right now. “Where are we, anyway? Another hiding place?”

“Yes. Balthazar had another storage locker not far from here. But let’s see whether they’ve followed us here before we head to it.”

They walked around for a while, taking random turns—or at least what looked to Claire like random turns—until she was damp and chilled, her clothes not suited for that kind of weather. It looked like a small town, the streets not as busy as they would’ve been in a bigger city, and they were definitely a lot further north than Long Beach, California. Once Castiel was satisfied with the lack of demonic presence, they visited another storage locker as cluttered as the first. Castiel declared it a bust too.

\---

The rest of the day was spent whirling through half-a-dozen other locations. More dusty storage lockers, but also thick darkened woods and caves and lakes and deserts, and, by the time the light was starting to dim as dusk settled,—East Coast dusk, most probably, because at her watch it was still only six o’clock—Claire was wearied to the bone, cold and hungry. Even though she didn’t mind the angel mode of transportation, she was starting to get dizzier with every new trip. They’d had to dodge demons a few other times and it looked more and more like they were not just lucky-guessing at their destination, but actively following them.

“H–how—are—they doing this?” Claire said, teeth chattering from the cold of their new location: the wind-whipped side of a mountain, right at the open mouth of a pitch-black cave. She hugged herself tight, grabbing at her elbows, trying to preserve what little warmth she had left in her core.

“They must have put some sort of a tracker on one of us, or on something we have,” Castiel said grimly, his eyes sweeping over what they could see of the valley from the ledge they were standing on. “We’ll have a look in here before we head back to Ben’s apartment. We’ll have the leisure then to get this sorted.”

Something on them, or on something they had—Claire didn’t have anything on her but her clothes, but the idea that demons could have put something on her _body_ —how? could it have happened when she had been wrestling demons at Jody’s house?—was enough to give her a full body shudder that was not entirely caused by the temperature.

“Yes. Right. Let’s have a look.”

They had explored a few other caves in various areas of the world, but this one looked particularly uninviting. Claire swallowed hard, feeling her saliva go down. Nevertheless, she took a resolute step into the shadows. Darkness seemed to engulf her almost instantly, like it had a life of its own and wasn’t just the absence of light. She felt Castiel’s presence at her back, and even though she didn’t know where to stand with him right now, it still brought her a measure of comfort and she straightened, squaring her shoulders.

“Can you—I don’t know, make a light or something?” She whispered her question, for some reason unwilling to disturb the oppressive silence.

“Of course.”

A second later, a ball of pure white light was floating at face-level between them. It was so bright that it drew no shadow on Castiel’s face, but made him look pale and washed out, almost like a corpse. Claire thought of the little flame Jesse sometimes conjured, warm and alive, writhing in the center of his palm as if trying to escape. Hell versus Heaven. She suddenly missed Ben and Jesse a lot more fiercely than a few hours’ long separation should have warranted.

“How deep is this cave?” she asked, still keeping her voice low.

“Not as deep as it looks. But this place is… peculiar. We shouldn’t spend more time here than we need. Follow me.”

She let him lead the way, trailing after the white light and the narrow back in the ill-fitting trench coat. Not being able to see Castiel’s face and expression made it easier to confuse him with her father, but he looked so much less big than he had when she was a child. Her eyes welled up at the thought of Jimmy, and she blinked a few times until they stopped burning.

Something flew past her face, not grazing her but still moving air, and it startled her badly enough that she let out a short, contained yelp. It took a few seconds for her heart to go back to a normal pace.

“Claire?”

“I’m fine. I think it was a bat.” Hopefully.

Having a light, she found out as they walked further, was a double-edged sword. The complete darkness had been unnerving enough, and she was grateful to be able to see her path. But now the shadows at the edge of their bubble of light seemed all the thicker, standing guard like a pack of wolves circling a fire, waiting for the right opening to pounce on them.

“Do you feel anything?” she whispered. “I think—”

Maybe she was too tired, too nervous, and too paranoid to make sense of what she was feeling, but she thought it felt like they weren’t alone in that cave, that they were being watched by something that wasn’t friendly at all.

“Castiel?” she said, making his name no more than a squeak. “I wanna turn back. Let’s—”

There was a distinct sound, coming from behind them, closer to the entrance of the cave. It was a crunching noise like someone stepping on gravel, and the moment she heard it she knew it was more demons. Paradoxically, it made Claire feel less terrified. A well-known threat sounded more manageable than whatever ominous presence she could feel lurking in the dark. She blindly gripped Castiel’s coat sleeve, but, before they had the time for one more Houdini act, two silhouettes stepped inside the circle of light—one unknown man, and the woman Claire had fought at Jody’s house.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” said the woman before she lunged herself at Claire.

Claire stumbled back and into Castiel, losing her grasp of him. The light vanished and darkness rushed back, leaving Claire to rely on her other senses to ward off the demons’ attacks and to find Castiel’s arm again. Hands were trying to get a hold of her, but she could feel them all the more acutely now that sight wasn’t an option anymore. She managed to block them and tried to get past them so she could run towards the exit. She’d only made a few steps when she got pushed into a wall, her shoulder taking the brunt of the shock, sending a jolt of pain through her arm.

“Castiel,” she grunted.

Sudden light breached the darkness on the trail of a scream from one of the demons, and she could see Castiel illuminated by the light rays shooting out of the male demon’s mouth and eyes. His grim expression looked hollow in the unnatural lighting. The demon’s human host crumpled on himself, and Claire felt a pang, wondering if the man was dead or alive, but the other demon, frozen for a moment by what had happened to her companion, looked ready to attack Castiel again and Claire left all thoughts aside and jumped to her feet, colliding into the demon and sending them both to the ground.

“Claire!” Castiel barked. Claire rolled aside to get out of his way and when light surged again, she could see that Castiel had hauled the demon to her feet by grabbing the collar of her jacket.

When darkness settled again Claire remained for a moment on her back, trying to catch her breath.

“Are there any more of them?” she asked.

She couldn’t feel anything, but she was rattled enough that she didn’t entirely trust herself.

“I don’t think so.”

“Are the hosts—are they—”

She heard a swish of fabric, Castiel moving, before he said, “They’re both dead.”

“Is it because you—”

“They were no more than animated corpses.”

_Just as you are, then._ The words burned like acid in her throat but she said nothing.

“I want to get out of here.”

Maybe the sword was here, maybe it wasn’t, but she’d be damned if she stayed one more minute. She heard a scraping noise indicating that Castiel was following suit, and told herself that she didn’t care what he did—which was a stupid thought, because he was her ride back home and she didn’t know where she was—but it made her feel better to be able to pretend that kind of savage indifference.

They emerged from the cave and sunlight hit her in the face, making her close her eyes against its assault. The wind dried the sweat from the fight off her skin and she shivered, cold and exhausted. The sound of Castiel’s footsteps came from behind her, echoing against the walls of the cave.

“What are we going to do with the bodies?” she asked, even though it was the last thing she wanted to talk about.

“I’ll come back for them later.”

“Their families—”

“I’ll handle it, Claire.”

Shamefully, she left it at that and didn’t question it further. He put a hand on her shoulder and she tensed against the contact.

“Let’s get you home.”

\---

Ben and Jesse hadn’t been any luckier than them, but they also hadn’t encountered any demons.

“Maybe they’re afraid of Jesse,” Ben suggested.

It had been said without irony but drew a chuckle out of Jesse, who said, “I knew there was a reason I liked you, mate.”

“They must have tracked us one way or another,” Claire said somberly.

Castiel was gone, but she thought it was unlikely that the demons would be able to track him without Castiel being aware of it. She, on the other hand—

“Dean told me about magic coins being used as trackers sometimes,” Ben said.

“The only moment I can think of when a demon could have put a tracker on me is at Jody’s home, and I’m not wearing anything I wore that day.”

“They could have marked you, then.”

“But we had a pretty, uh, thorough examination of Claire’s body the other night,” Jesse objected.

“Were you looking for demonic marks? Because I wasn’t, and she was pretty bruised up.”

“Okay,” Claire said, making it to get to her feet. “I’m going to the bathroom to give it a look.” She gave them a warning look. “I don’t need any help.”

She couldn’t imagine mixing sex with that kind of grim activity, but obviously they could because they both looked disappointed.

“What about the parts of your body that you can’t see for yourself?” Jesse said.

“I’ll use the mirror.” He opened his mouth but she didn’t let him speak: “Please, I need to be alone right now.”

That did the trick. Jesse shrugged and said, “Okay. Call if you need anything. We’ll rush to your side in no time.”

She felt her lips twitch. “I have no doubt.”

“I mean it. If at any moment you feel like you can’t handle it—”

“Oh, shut up.”

Ben started to snicker but she ignored him, turning away. Once she was in the bathroom, she slowly peeled off her clothes, suddenly all too aware of her new aches now that she was on her own and could focus on herself. She turned to the mirror hung above the sink; the light from the neon light shed revealing light on her pallor and on the shadows under her eyes. She looked like a piece of clothing that had had one too many washings. She certainly felt like it. She wasn’t usually one to be self-conscious about her appearance, but the person she was seeing in the mirror at that moment looked too pale, too thin, and way too gloomy.

She sighed, and started to look herself over, beginning with the soles of her feet and then methodically moving up to her ankles, her calves, her thighs, the planes of her stomach. She had several series of bruises marring her skin in a few places; some were already paling to a greenish yellow, but others were new and sensitive to the touch.

She heard someone knock on the door just as she was examining her breasts, feeling stupid because how could a demon manage to mark her here?

“You okay in here?” asked Ben; he sounded like he was talking with his face pressed to the door.

She had the brief thought that he probably wouldn’t mind helping her with the examination of her breasts, and it made her smile.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Go bother Jesse.”

“Jesse isn’t standing in the bathroom naked, examining every inch of his skin.”

“If you ask him nicely, I’m sure it can be arranged.”

He laughed softly and the sound sparked a bloom of warmth in the center of Claire’s chest. When he spoke again, though, he sounded serious. “Is everything okay with Castiel? When he took you back you looked, I don’t know—tense.”

She felt a sigh make its way up her throat and stifled it. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Okay.” He tapped on the door twice. “Have fun in there.”

Right, fun. She resumed her self-examination, following the course of her fingers in the mirror when she got to her collarbone and couldn’t look at it directly. She had a few bruises there, looking like fingerprints and undoubtedly the courtesy of the demon she had fought at Jody’s. Most of the bruises were the yellow color of healing bruises, except for an angry red one that stood out in contrast with the others. She rubbed a finger over it and felt some sort of pattern in relief. She leaned forward, squinting at her image in the mirror: it was definitely not a normal bruise, but she couldn’t recognize the symbol drawn there. She covered it with her palm, like she could interfere with whatever tracking method the demons used.

Taking a resolute breath, she put her clothes back on and left the bathroom. The boys were in the living room, chatting in low voices but in relaxed enough undertones that she didn’t think it was about anything serious. She found them on the couch, Jesse perched on the arm, Ben sitting with his legs drawn to his chest. They stopped talking when she came in, immediately looking at her in silent question.

“I found something,” she said, cutting right to the chase. “Looks like some sort of symbol, but I don’t know where it’s from.” She hooked a finger under the collar of her top and drew it down so they could have a look.

“How come we didn’t notice it before?” Ben said, looking troubled and maybe a little guilty.

“I guess that, when the other bruises were fresh, it didn’t stand out as much.”

“How can we get rid of it?” Jesse said.

She looked at him. “Well, I do have an idea.”

She knew he’d gotten her meaning when his face fell. “Jesus,” he said, threading his fingers through his hair. “Okay, right.”

“Okay to what?” Ben asked, looking back and forth between Jesse and Claire. “What are you going to—” The tip of Jesse’s forefinger started to glow a bright red. “Oh. Aw, man.”

“It’s not that different from when you were carving that symbol into Jesse’s skin,” Claire said, trying to sound like her insides weren’t tying into knots from anticipation and dread.

“Well, I wasn’t a fan of that either, but at least I knew Jesse would heal quickly. Besides,” Ben added with the hint of a smirk, “I think he got off on it—didn’t you, Jess?”

Jesse flushed violently, but he sounded light when he replied, “Yeah, kinda. Not because of the pain, but—I don’t know, something about the intimacy, I guess.”

Ben shook his head in mock disapproval. “The two of you and your mutilation kink. For the record, I don’t like this at all.”

“Duly noted,” Claire said, but it was Jesse that Ben was looking at, all amusement gone from his eyes. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yeah,” Jesse said, but he looked more confused than sure.

“Fine,” Ben said. “But let me get the first aid kit before you start.”

Jesse’s finger stopped glowing. “I didn’t think of that,” he said apologetically to Claire while Ben was off in the bathroom. “It didn’t even occur to me.”

“It’s fine,” she told him, but, even though she saw him do impossible things all the time, this obliviousness regarding injuries gave her an uncomfortable sense of how far from human he was.

Ben came back with their first aid kit—which had undergone a serious upgrade since they had taken up hunting—and motioned for Claire to sit down on the couch. “It won’t do you good to be standing when the pain hits,” he said.

She complied, her skin now tingling with nerves. She almost wished that Jesse had done it right when she had suggested it so that it would be over with already. Jesse sat beside her and she had to half-turn to face him, pushing her hair to give him access. His finger glowed like simmering embers and he inched closer to her until they touched. Claire could feel his breath against her skin and she suddenly understood what he had meant about intimacy.

“Ready?” Jesse said softly, his gray eyes searching her face for signs that she didn’t want to do this anymore. “On the count of three: one, two—”

“Ow!”

Jesse scooted away from her, hands falling back to his sides. “Are you okay?”

She had to stop pinching her lips to grind out an answer. “Not really.”

She’d known it would hurt, but she hadn’t had the time to give it much thought and she realized now that some part of her had assumed it would just be one bad moment to weather, like getting a shot. But actually she felt like the pain was just getting worse by the second, and now she could swear that Jesse had burned the whole underside of her collarbone.

“I’m sorry,” Jesse said.

“It’s okay.” She didn’t feel much like talking, but he looked stricken and she had done this to him, so she forced out a smile. “I asked you to. Thank you.”

“Hopefully it’ll be enough for the mark to stop working,” Ben said. “Let me see it.”

Jesse gave away his spot on the couch to Ben, then must have disappeared somewhere because she couldn’t hear or feel him in the room and didn’t dare try to turn her head to look.

“He’s gone?” she asked Ben as he was cleaning up the burn with a disinfectant that didn’t sting.

Ben’s eyes briefly flicked away to check. “Yeah.”

“I should have just done it myself. I shouldn’t have asked it of him.” Jesse’s powers had been used to hurt people before. She hadn’t even stopped to take this into consideration.

Ben looked up from her wound and into her eyes. “Yeah, maybe you shouldn’t have. But hey, what’s done is done.” His fingers were now rubbing some cream into her burn in slow circles, soothing the pain to a manageable level. “Better now?”

“Yes. Thank you. And sorry.”

Ben cocked his head. “About Jesse? If you feel like apologizing, then I don’t think I’m the right target. But you know, I don’t think he’ll get it if you do. You asked for something, he didn’t have to think twice before giving it to you. If he feels bad about it now, he probably think it’s a failure on his part.”

Claire felt her cheeks burn. “I’m the worst girlfriend ever, am I?”

“Oh, no, hey.” Ben stroked a hand over her hair, up to the top of her and down to the back of her neck. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel like shit about it.”

She nodded, the weight of his hand warm against the nape of her neck.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m performing a juggling act, dating you two,” he said.

“You don’t have to take everything upon yourself.”

“I know. Must be my nurturing nature,” he said dryly. “Anyway, don’t feel bad. You had to act quickly before the demons used that mark again. And you look like you had a really crap day, hmm?”

His hand had moved to massaging the junctions between neck and shoulders with his thumb and fingers, digging expertly into the hard muscles there. She rocked back her head into the contact and closed her eyes.

“Yes. Very crappy day. Much wandering about into caves and storage lockers and being stalked by demons.”

“Sounds like my day. Except for the ‘stalked by demons’ part.”

“Castiel asked my permission to use me again as a vessel when we fight the Leviathan.”

The hand on her neck stilled. She didn’t open her eyes, unwilling to confront the expression she could imagine was on his face.

“Tell me I’m not petting _Castiel_ right now.” There was a strain to his voice, like he was trying hard to sound light-hearted but couldn’t quite get there.

“Of course not. You would notice the difference, believe me. He was just asking, in case—It would only be temporary.”

“You’re considering it.”

She had to open her eyes then, because she couldn’t read his voice at all, but it turned out that the look on his face wasn’t much easier to decipher.

“It would only be temporary,” she repeated, and hated how it came out as almost pleading.

“Why does he need you?” Ben had dropped his hand from her neck and she felt the loss keenly. “I thought—You told me before that he’d promised your father he wouldn’t use you again. What happened to that?”

She felt a tightness in her chest, like a hand closing on her heart, the pain fresh again at the thought of what Castiel had revealed to her.

“My father is dead,” she said, looking down to her hands. “He’s just an empty shell now, and my father’s soul is now—in Heaven, I guess.”

“Oh, Claire.”

“It means that Castiel doesn’t have as much power as he would with a living vessel. That’s why he needs me to fight the Leviathan.”

She still wasn’t looking at Ben, but she felt the couch move with the shift of his weight, and it wasn’t a surprise when his arms circled around her.

“I’m sorry,” he said against her ear. “But at least, your father must be at peace now.”

She hadn’t considered it under that angle; now, she felt the prickle of tears in her eyes at the thought. Her father in Heaven meant that he really was dead; her father in Heaven meant he was no longer chained to a comet.

“You don’t want me to accept Castiel’s request,” she said, and Ben released her.

“The decision is yours, as it’s always been. I’m just… scared that you won’t come back from it. That you won’t want to.”

She wanted to give him the assurances he needed to hear, but she wasn’t actually sure of what she felt, and lying to him wasn’t something she had in her. “It’s not—You and Jesse have each other.”

“Is that supposed to make it okay?” he snapped. “Do you think you two are interchangeable in my eyes?”

“No. Of course not. I didn’t mean it that way.”

He looked away, like he didn’t want her to see his face, but his body language was just as easy to read. As if summoned by his anguish, Jesse appeared right in the spot Ben had diverted his attention to, and Claire saw Ben’s tension flop from his shoulders. Claire felt a pang at the sight: just as he was afraid that she wouldn’t come back from her angelic possession, Ben was always afraid that Jesse wouldn’t come back when he went off like this.

Jesse’s hair was a mess, tousled like it had been whipped by the wind, but he looked relaxed and he smiled at the sight of them on the couch.

“Hey.”

Claire stood up and walked up to him, put her arms around him and her chin on his shoulder. She could feel his heart beat, reverberating from his ribcage through hers. He smelled like fresh air and his skin was cooler to the touch than usual.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“What for?”

She pulled away and gestured to her collarbone, to where she could still feel a dull pulse of pain. “This. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“But you couldn’t have just done it yourself. It was more practical that way.”

She shook her head. He wouldn’t understand, Ben had said. She held Jesse tighter, and after a moment she could feel him run his knuckles against her spine.

\---

Waking up in the middle of the night from a dream seemed to have become a habit, one that she could have done without. It wouldn’t be as bad if each time she didn’t also wake up Ben or Jesse or both.

“Claire?” Ben mumbled. “Again?”

You knew things were bad when one of the first things the person sharing your bed said was ‘ _again_ ’. But this time, at least, she wasn’t feeling the usual dread, panic or incomprehension. On the contrary, as the adrenaline from the dream started to ebb and she was parsing the meaning of it, her main emotion was excitement.

“Is Jesse awake?” she asked, trying to sound calm and not even a little bit unhinged.

“Yeah,” Jesse grumbled. “Yeah, now I am. What—”

“Castiel!” Claire called. “Castiel, come here!”

“What?” Jesse scrambled to a sitting position. “Oh, no, you’re not going to summon an angel to our _bedroom_ —”

“Hello,” Castiel said. “Don’t mind me.”

All the lights in the room—from the overhead lamp and the nightstand lamp on Claire’s side—flashed on and off and the shelf fixed above Ben’s desk trembled.

“Oops,” said Jesse. “Sorry about that. Oh, hey, hi, Castiel,” he added wryly. “Please, make yourself at home.”

Castiel looked unfazed at finding the three of them in bed. Claire wondered for the first time how much awareness he had of their relationship, and what exactly he thought of it. Jesse didn’t seem to share Claire’s nonchalance about Castiel’s apparition and acted uncharacteristically worried about his modesty, pulling the sheet to cover himself with it.

“Am I dreaming?” he asked, the tense undercurrent in his voice reminding Claire that, coming from him, this wasn’t entirely a joke. “Although, given the ridiculous of the situation, I guess this is reality after all.”

“What’s going on, Claire?” Ben said.

Castiel looked around the room before he set his eyes on Claire. “I don’t see any immediate threat,” he said with a slightly questioning intonation.

“Ah, no, sorry.”

He looked at her, and she found herself blushing under his inquisitive stare. Why hadn’t she waited for the morning before calling him? Trying to compose herself—as much as it was possible when wearing a flimsy night gown and sitting in her bed—she used her most even voice to explain: “There’s no threat, but I had another dream, one that I believe was sent to me by Millie, and I think that what she tried to show me was the location of the sword. Did Millie—well, Muriel—knew Balthazar? Enough for him to confide in her?”

“I…” Castiel frowned. “Maybe. I guess. I was out of touch with my brethren for a little while so I imagine it’s not impossible that at some point they got closer to each other. Are you sure the sword is there?”

“Really pretty sure.” Claire felt a renewed surge of excitement. “But we actually have to wait for daytime before we go there,” she added, a bit embarrassed. “I just… I couldn’t wait to tell you.”

She heard the eagerness in her voice like she was listening to another person, a girl waiting for fatherly approbation—but Castiel wasn’t her father, was he, he was only masquerading as Jimmy Novak. The bitterness and horror at learning about her father’s death came back with a vengeance, and she felt something cold and nauseating curl at the pit of her stomach. She managed to school her features into something cool and neutral.

“I’m sorry for calling you up for no reason. You can go now. Just—” They needed to figure some plan of action, didn’t they? “Let’s meet tomorrow at the Winchesters’ place, okay?”

“Okay.”

Castiel left, and Claire fell back on her pillows, looking up at the ceiling.

“Sorry,” she said. There was a silence, and she suddenly worried that the boys were mad at her, the thought tugging at her heart in a most unusual way. Then Jesse said, “Can we go back to sleep now?” with enough good humor that she knew that he had forgiven her for Castiel’s intrusion.

When they met with Castiel at the Winchesters’ the next day, Claire explained her dream to everyone.

“I don’t know,” Dean said, his mouth curving downward. “That sounds like an odd way to hide a fucking divine sword.”

“It does sound like Balthazar, though,” Castiel said pensively. “Very… human.”

“Mm, yeah,” Sam said distractedly. He hadn’t stopped typing away on his laptop since they had gotten there. “Meanwhile I have a few possible locations for the Leviathan: I looked for large bodies of water, testimonies about things hiding in the water, strings of deaths or missing persons. I’ll ask Bobby to make a few calls to his network, try to narrow it down.”

“And what do we do once we have the sword?” Jesse asked. “Just go and—” He made a swinging motion with his hands. “—chop the monster’s head?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Dean said dryly.

“What about Ramiel?” Ben asked. “And his demon lackeys? Even without the Leviathan they can keep trying to take the kids.”

“Ramiel will be a lot easier to deal with than the Leviathan,” Castiel said.

“And I don’t think that he’s really in control of the situation,” Claire said, remembering the voice from her Leviathan dream, the one shouting defiantly at the monster. “I think he’s in way over his head.”

“And we aren’t?” Jesse murmured, but then shrugged and said in a louder voice: “Let’s not waste time, okay?”

Ben and Jesse came with Claire and Castiel, in case Claire was still being tracked and they had more demons problems. Claire didn’t point out that they had handled it okay the last time, because right now she wasn’t very comfortable being alone with Castiel, the awkwardness of the previous night and the day before crystalizing into a ball of dread weighing the bottom of her stomach. Nothing about who they were to each other had ever been easy, but now it seemed simply untenable.

By tacit agreement that didn’t need more than a few exchanged glances, Ben travelled with Castiel and Claire travelled with Jesse. They all popped up in a Chicago back alley, the only witness to their feat being a skinny calico-colored cat that hissed and screeched at their arrival. The tiny creature snaked around her ankles and disappeared behind the corner.

It was probably close to noon East Coast, and the sun was higher in the sky than in California. It was cooler here, the wind carrying an icy edge, but they had planned for it except for Jesse, who never feared the cold. When Claire shivered despite her extra layer of clothing, Jesse wrapped an arm around her, immediately bathing her side in heat.

“California has thinned your blood,” he said teasingly, giving her shoulders a squeeze.

“You have an unfair advantage,” she replied, pretending to push him away.

“Where to now?” Ben said.

He looked strained and unhappy, and Claire understood why when she caught one of the unfriendly glances he was shooting Castiel. He had always acted fairly neutral toward Castiel, mindful of the Winchesters’ complicated friendship with him and of his odd connection to Claire, but not forgetting the part where he had tried to kill Jesse when he was a kid. This was Ben, loyal to a fault even when managing different loyalties started to look like a delicate exercise. Claire was pretty sure that Ben’s own history with Castiel—the fact that he had tinkered with Ben’s memories on Dean’s order—wasn’t a big part of how he felt about the angel. But now, with Claire’s confession from the day before, it looked like the balance was tipping in Castiel’s disfavor. Or maybe Ben was scared Castiel would just go and snatch Claire right under his eyes, even though she’d explained to him that this wasn’t how it worked.

She gently disentangled herself from Jesse. “Follow me,” she said, and walked out of the narrow alley to a larger street with the others trailing behind.

She’d never come here in reality, but her dream had been specific enough that she recognized her surroundings, even though it had been night time when Millie had shown her the place. They walked up the street, Claire looking around for the landmarks Millie had given her: here a colorful mural, covering the red bricks with a palette of blues, from bright azure to pale aquamarine; there, the red and yellow awning of a deli, whiffs of chicken and fresh rolls coming from it. She stopped, burying her hands in the pockets of her hoodie, hunching her shoulders against the cold.

“It’s here,” she murmured.

_Here_ was a narrow bar, squashed between a bakery and a pharmacy. It felt strange to see it for real, looking identical to her dream. They crossed the street and entered the bar with trepidation. Inside, it was dark and stuffy; brick walls, a low ceiling, and even though Claire couldn’t see anyone smoking—in fact, the bar was nearly empty—it looked like there was a faint cloud of dirty smoke hanging at face level.

“Hello,” Claire said to the man behind the bar, who was playing some sort of card game with himself. Mounted on the wall above his head was a flashing TV screen; the TV had been put on mute but showed scantily clad girls dancing to a silent beat.

“Hi,” the man said, palming away the cards with the ease of a magician. He had greasy blond hair brushed back and a skinny, angular face. “What d’you wanna drink?”

“Uh,” she said. She’d thought the man would somehow know what they were here for, and now she was at loss for what to say: should she tell him the truth or make up an excuse?

Castiel took over, fishing out a photo that he slid across the counter to the barman. “Do you know this man? We have come to retrieve something he entrusted to you.”

The barman examined the picture, frowning. “I don’t—” He looked up at Castiel with glowering suspicion. “Are you a cop? Because I’m not—hey, wait a minute. I know _you_.”

The statement seemed to push Castiel off-kilter. “I… very much doubt it. I have never been here before.”

“No, no, I know you. I know you.”

The man turned his back on them, keeping a finger pointed at Castiel even as he left his bar and walked to a door at the other end of the room, repeating _I know you_ on a loop. Castiel turned to them, a very human expression of helplessness on his face.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Well, obviously this man recognized you,” Ben said a little impatiently.

“But I’ve never seen him before,” Castiel insisted, frustration seeping into his voice.

“That’s not what _he_ —”

“Maybe you’ve just forgotten about it,” Jesse said, surprisingly placating. He eyed Ben warily, probably having noticed the new hostility as Claire had, but lacking the context to make sense of it.

“That’s impossible. I do not forget.”

“It’s true,” Claire said.

She remembered the man from Millie’s dream, and didn’t get why he had recognized Castiel, but not Balthazar’s picture. Had Balthazar actually sent _Millie_ to hide the sword? Was it why she knew so much about it?

She was at that point in her musings when the barman came back, carrying an oblong object wrapped in a frayed blanket. Someone pushed the door of the bar and entered, and the barman swiftly hid the package under the counter and went to ask the new comer what he wanted to drink.

“Do you think that’s—” Jesse murmured under his breath, practically without moving his lips.

Claire could feel something pulse slow and warm from under the counter. “I think so, yes.”

The new patron took his drink to a further corner of the room, and the barman directed his attention back to them. He leaned toward them, angling himself away from the rest of the room, and they all shifted closer to heed him.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said, pushing the package over to Castiel. “I just know it’s for you. I didn’t even _remember_ —” His eyes were wide, the whites of them shocking in the semi-darkness of the bar. “Take it and get the hell away. I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”

He gave the package a little shove and Castiel grabbed it, hiding it away in his trench coat. The barman then turned his back on them and proceeded to act as if they weren’t here.

“Well, that was weird,” said Jesse once they were outside, Claire feeling the relatively cooler temperature bite at her cheeks.

“Is it even the sword?” Ben asked, casting a doubtful glance at the bulge under Castiel’s coat. “And why didn’t Balthazar just give you the sword when he gave you the other angelic weapons in the first place? Why the whole charade with the barman?”

“I think that maybe,” Castiel said carefully, “Balthazar didn’t completely trust the person I was when he gave me the other weapons.”

It was only once they had got back to the alley where they had arrived that Castiel started to unwrap the package.

“We’re going to look silly if this isn’t really the sword,” Ben murmured.

But it was—or at least it was _a_ sword, and, judging by the aura of power Claire could feel even more clearly now that it was bared, it was no ordinary sword either.

“What’s this?” Jesse asked, pointing at a symbol drawn on the inside of the blanket.

“It’s Enochian,” Claire said, but she couldn’t remember the meaning before Castiel explained, “It’s what made the barman forget he had it until we came in. Anyone else but a select few come for the sword, and that man would have been unable to remember he even had it. It probably also explains why he couldn’t recognize Balthazar.”

Jesse looked transfixed by the sword. “Who’s gonna wield it?”

He held his hand as if to reach for it but stopped himself before he completed the movement, fingers curling like against intense heat.

“I’m not touching this thing with a ten-foot pole,” Ben said emphatically. “And neither should you—who knows what an artifact made by Heaven could do to you?”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“I’ll use it,” Castiel said, closing his fingers around the handle. He glanced at Claire; she thought _we’ll use it_ , and it sent her heart racing, adrenaline flooding her body.

“We should leave before someone sees us waving that sword,” she said.

As they made the jump back to the Winchesters’, she could feel the sword, its power throbbing through her body like a second heart.

\---

The next day, as they were getting ready to go to the Winchesters’ to decide on a plan, Blake showed up unannounced with a Blue-Ray and a bottle of cheap wine.

“Hel-looo?” he said, his eyes sweeping over the three of them, holding hands in the middle of the living room. “Are you—what the fuck are you doing? Is this some kind of dance?”

“Oh, uh,” Ben said, and snapped his mouth shut. Claire and probably everyone else in the room could hear the cogs in his mind turning, trying to come up with something.

But Blake didn’t let him think. A line appeared between his eyebrows as he frowned, and Claire remembered with some unease that he had seen them materialize from thin air once, in that exact same position.

“Fuck me,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re—”

Ben broke off from Jesse’s hold and dragged Blake a little further away, giving them a semblance of privacy even though Claire and Jesse could still hear everything.

“What’s going on?” Blake whispered furiously. “We haven’t seen you in days. Jesse missed work! Katie sent me here because she texted you about it and you didn’t text her back. She’s worried sick!”

“Shit,” Ben said. Claire knew enough about Katie to be aware that it took a lot to worry her. “I think my phone is out of battery and I forgot—I’ll call Katie. Jesse will call work and explain himself. I’m sorry.”

“Is it—” Blake shot a look over his shoulder at Claire and Jesse. “Is it like last time? Some sort of, of angel-demon thing?”

Ben didn’t say anything for a moment. “Yes,” he eventually said. “Something like that.”

Blake glared again in their direction, and Claire was shocked at the fierce look in his eyes, even more so when she realized that it was directed at Jesse; she’d never seen Blake act anything but friendly with him.

“Blake, hey.” Ben gave Blake’s shoulder a little shake. “I’ll be fine. And it’s not Jesse’s fault, so you can stop looking at him like he stole your sandwich.”

“It’s my fault,” Claire said, drawing a nonplussed look from Blake. “It is. But you don’t have to worry: I won’t let anything happen to him.”

It was a stupid thing to say, because there was no way she could make that kind of promise, but it had come out without input from her brain and she couldn’t very well take it back. _Please, Lord, give me the strength and power to keep my word._

Ben colored and mumbled, both to Blake and to her, “We’ll watch out for each other, okay. Blake, tell Katie not to worry too much, alright?”

“I don’t like this,” Blake grumbled. “Man, I’m glad you’re happy with them, but—”

He trailed off, but his meaning was clear enough. It hurt a little to hear, though she couldn’t blame Blake for thinking that way; Ben was his best and oldest friend, after all, so it was only natural that he would feel protective of him. She was surprised then when Blake turned to them and said, “Sorry, guys. I shouldn’t have—I’m just out of my depth here.”

“It’s fine, mate,” Jesse said, shrugging like he could easily roll the issue off his shoulders. “We all know the feeling.”

Blake eyed him curiously—maybe it hadn’t occurred to him that Claire and Jesse hadn’t been born into this. “Okay,” he said, breathing out the word on a sigh. “I’ll call you tomorrow, and I better get a fucking good story out of this.”

At the Winchesters’, they found that everyone was already there: Jody, who was pouring herself coffee and had a restrained little start at their arrival, almost missing the rim of her mug; Castiel, who stood in a corner of the room like a breathing piece of furniture; and an old bearded hunter with a baseball cap, who introduced himself as Bobby Singer. The man greeted Ben with a friendly pat on the shoulder and offered a hand for Claire to shake.

“Glad to finally meet you,” he said.

He shook hands with Jesse too. Seasoned hunter as he was, he hadn’t startled at their abrupt apparition, but Claire wasn’t inclined to trust the carefully neutral way he looked at Jesse. It seemed to indicate that the jury was still out on his case. Jesse paid it no mind—although he had undoubtedly noticed—and returned the handshake with warmth.

“Hey, Mr. Singer.”

“Don’t be so formal, kid,” Dean said from where he was cleaning guns; his weaponry battled for space with Sam’s computer and half-unfolded maps on the coffee table. He looked like a fish in water, his gestures easy and precise, his whole being brimming with purpose. “You can call him an old geezer.”

Singer shot him a dirty look, which Dean countered with a rakish grin.

“'Bobby' is fine,” Singer said to Jesse.

Jody gave everyone a one-armed hug, holding her coffee mug in the other hand. When she got to Claire, she said, “I hear you’ve been busy.”

“How are the kids?” Claire asked.

“Better than I would have expected. They seem to have gotten over the kidnapping attempt the very next day, and they barely ask for Millie. I wonder if she hasn’t found a way to keep in touch with them.”

“She’s contacted me, so she might have done the same with them. They’re young enough to take it in stride. Where are they now?”

“At a safe place, with a friend of mine. If everything goes well, we’ll reunite them with their grandparents soon.”

If everything goes well; now there was an awfully big ‘if’. Claire’s eyes swept around the room: daylight had started to wane, although not enough yet for a lamp to be turned on, so that it gave the scene a tired, faded air. A few aging hunters and three inexperienced youths; that was the whole head count of their army against Ramiel, the Leviathan and the Heaven knew how many demons Ramiel had on hold. Despite the sword, Claire felt very much like they were running into some heroic last standoff to be obliterated in a blaze of glory. But it was apparently the Winchesters’ specialty, and, if they were still here to talk about it, then maybe all wasn’t lost.

Sam cleared his throat, and everyone heeded this cue to gather around him. Only Dean kept at his task, not even glancing up in his brother’s direction. He had probably heard it all already.

“I think that the Leviathan is hiding in Lake Winnebago, a freshwater lake in eastern Wisconsin,” Sam explained, hunched over the map of Wisconsin he had unrolled on a corner of the coffee table. He pointed at the oblong blue spot that marked the lake. “A string of missing persons over the last few months, a few of them having been spotted here and there after they’ve gone missing—which means that they’ve likely been snatched as demon hosts—with reports of strange noises coming from the lake, a couple of sightings that no one took seriously because the witnesses were drunk teenagers. Many municipal drinking water systems draw directly from the lake, and people have been complaining about the water tasting funny."

"That doesn't seem like much to go on," Jody said.

"Yeah, I guess what really cinches the deal for me is that, even though the reports are officially considered nonsense, no local will get close to the lake anymore, and the animals are staying away too. Lake Winnebago is normally a very busy place: it’s a popular boating area, and there are usually tons of campers and hikers in the parks around it, but lately it's been completely deserted. People there are also big on fishing, but no one has dared taking a boat on the lake for any reason.”

“And we are running straight into it,” Jesse said almost cheerfully. “Isn’t it wonderful.”

Claire had been half-worried that their endeavor would stress him out, but he looked more relaxed than she had seen him in a long time, smiling and quipping like it was going out of fashion. Maybe the prospect of facing a real physical threat, one that wasn’t hidden in the recess of his mind, was actually sort of comforting to him.

“When are we doing this?” Singer grumbled, looking resigned to the folly of the whole thing. “Have a TV show I don’t want to miss.”

"More Tori Spelling?" Dean said.

"Well, ain't you in great form tonight."

“We should act as soon as possible,” Claire said. “Millie has been gone for three days. It won’t be long before—” She swallowed. “—before they either get what they want or get tired of her and kill her.”

_Not again_ , she swore to herself. Everyone was approaching the situation as if killing the Leviathan was the priority, but it wasn’t for Claire. _Her_ priority was to find Millie and get her back safe to her siblings. Everything else took a backseat to that mission.

“The lake’s large, about 215 square miles,” said Sam, “but the western shore has many shallow reefs, so I doubt the Leviathan is able to swim in that part. The eastern part has a drop-off type shoreline. This is where we have a better chance to draw it to us.”

“And how are we going to do that?” Jody said, hands clutching at her mug.

“Ramiel will feel us coming,” Castiel suddenly spoke up. “At least there is no way he will miss the coming of the sword. He’ll have demons with him, but I don’t think there are very many left.”

“They’re for us to handle,” Dean said firmly. “One angel and a few measly demons—piece of cake. You take care of the big fish.”

“I can help you,” Jesse said, and Castiel looked at him as though he was only realizing now that Jesse was in the room. “It’s a very big fish. I can distract it or whatever. I’m very slippery too.”

Castiel frowned, probably sensing there was a joke here that he couldn’t decipher, but after a moment he gave Jesse a small nod of agreement.

They went over the details, but the frightening truth was that they weren’t exactly sure what to expect. Except for the shreds of Claire’s dream, no one had seen a Leviathan in millennia, no even angels. Castiel didn’t mention wanting to use Claire as a vessel again; he seemed to have taken her reaction upon learning her father’s fate as a refusal, and Claire found herself unable to bring the topic up again, especially since they were never alone and she could feel Ben’s eyes on her.

When it was dark, they decided to take off, and Castiel and Jesse needed a couple of trips to get them all to destination. Wisconsin welcomed them with a gust of chilly wind. They’d landed on a thin band of sand, cliffs looming at their backs. They couldn’t see any star but the overcast sky glowed faintly—the moon must have been full, or close to it. The wind blew in all directions, bringing the smell of rain with it, stirring the lake water into waves that crashed at their feet.

“Can you feel anything?” Jesse whispered to Claire.

She focused, trying to feel past the hard pounding of her heart and the metallic taste in her mouth. The burn under her collarbone throbbed dully.

“There’s something…”

“It’s here,” Castiel said.

His eyes were fixed on the rippling surface of the lake, and right when he said it, Claire, getting used to the darkness, thought she saw a large shadow move underwater, further away from the shore and towards of the center of the lake.

“What I want to know,” Dean grumbled, “is where the hell are Ramiel and his cronies.”

He was holding his shotgun ready and was flanked by his brother and Bobby Singer, who kept close to him like a pair of bodyguards.

“Maybe they’re holed up somewhere else,” Ben said. “Even if Ramiel and the Leviathan are in some sort of partnership, I guess we can’t blame the guy for wanting to keep away as much as…”

Claire didn’t hear the rest of Ben’s sentence, overwhelmed as she was by the wash of warmth announcing the arrival of an angel.

“What are you doing here!” Ramiel yelled at them.

He was still wearing Ben’s former neighbor Mr. Bennet, and seemed to glow brighter than before to Claire’s angel senses—she pushed back nausea at the thought of where this new power came from—but he also looked unhinged and unkempt. All the angels Claire had ever seen in their vessels had always looked in control of their appearance, so something was obviously wrong here. Was it because of the extra grace he had absorbed, or the strain of working with the Leviathan? Whatever it was, Ramiel went on scolding them like they were actors straying off the script.

“Are you insane? What if he sees you? Get out of here! _Now_ , you lowly, stupid—”

“Are you talking about the Leviathan?” Castiel asked.

Ramiel startled at the sound of his voice, like he hadn’t seen him there, and the expression of panic on his face morphed into disdain. “Castiel,” he said, investing the name with as much distaste as two syllables could contain. “Still slaving for those humans, I see.”

“I trust it will serve me better than allying myself with a Leviathan,” Castiel replied. “What are you doing, Ramiel? Are you still trying to open Lucifer’s cage?”

Ramiel’s eyes wavered and settled on Jesse. “Don’t think about it,” Jesse said, glowering.

Ramiel’s haughty expression hardened. “I have moved on to bigger things, cambion. You can keep your powers to yourself, for all the good they do you.” He smirked cruelly, and Jesse stiffened. “No, I aim for bigger things. If Lucifer remains out of reach in his Cage, then I will—”

He was interrupted by Dean’s sudden bark of laughter. “Sorry, pal,” he said to Ramiel’s offended expression. “It’s just that it sounded like you were saying _you_ wanted to replace Lucifer, and, well. I don’t want to burst your bubble, but you can gobble as much grace as you want, I really don’t think you have the shoulders for the job.”

Ramiel spluttered with indignation, but, before he could form a sentence, Sam said, “I have known Lucifer rather intimately, and I have to agree with my brother here.”

Claire had a sudden sense of pity for Ramiel at that moment: he looked puny and breakable despite the borrowed grace she could feel churning inside him.

“Is that what he promised you?” she asked him gently. “The Leviathan. He told you that, if you gathered enough grace, you would become as powerful as Lucifer? What’s in it for him, then?”

She must have struck a sensitive chord, because Ramiel uttered an inarticulate cry and dashed at her. She barely had the time to pull out the angel sword Castiel had given her a year ago and block his arm with it. Trying to fend him off, she noticed he was reaching for a spot under her left breast, right where the fragment of Castiel’s grace lingered behind her ribs. It fueled her body with adrenaline and she fought harder, throwing him off her.

Around them a battle erupted as a dozen of demons had appeared and started fighting the hunters and Castiel. Gunshots broke out, light flashed whenever Castiel forcibly exorcized the demons, and, from the corner of her eye, Claire saw Jesse extract demon smoke out of a host with what looked like his bare hands. She couldn’t have said how long she wrestled with Ramiel, but her arms were aching and sweat was running down her back. Their struggles led them closer to the water and there, Claire caught Ramiel glancing worriedly at the lake.

“What is it, Ramiel?” Claire called brazenly, her chest heaving from exertion. She had her back to the narrow beach and the rest of the battle, and she thought she heard a strangled cry that sounded like Ben but forced herself not to look. “Are you scared? In over your head, are you? If you had known what you were getting into—”

“Shut your filthy mouth,” Ramiel snarled and jumped her again, catching her shoulders and trying to force her down. “I have no lesson to receive from an angel reject!” he spat to her face.

“Where’s Millie?” she shot back. “What did you do with her?”

He didn’t have the time to reply; all of a sudden, a roar came from the lake, a rush like the ocean in a storm. Battle sounds quieted behind her and Ramiel released Claire with an undignified squeak. Claire, strangely enough, felt no fear as she watched a wave of water surging up. The Leviathan emerged in its center, an enormous indistinct mass cascading with water.

The demons scurried away, some of them popping out of sight, and Claire turned back and ran to the rest of her group, who had instinctively clustered together. Ramiel was the only one brave or crazy enough to get closer to the shore and talk to the monster: “I have it under control! You can go back to the bottom of the lake!”

_I feel grace._

“Yes, that’s—an old acquaintance. I’m taking care of it!”

_What about the child?_

“She hasn’t—She’s close to yielding! You’ll have your share of grace soon, I promise.”

They shared the grace with each other, then—that was what the Leviathan got out of their deal. That explained how he could have grown from whatever size he’d been when he’d escaped Purgatory to the giant he was now. Claire’s chest seized at Ramiel’s assurance that Millie was ‘close to yielding.’

The monster shifted and the water heaved with its movement.

_Cambion._

Claire swirled around to look at Jesse, standing rigidly with his eyes on the Leviathan, the only one of them empty-handed. But not harmless: he didn’t look afraid at all, unlike Ben, who had moved protectively to his side, the demon-killing knife Dean had given him a year ago drawn out.

“Bring it on, fishguy,” Jesse said softly, cracking his knuckles in a ridiculous tough-guy gesture that didn’t really fit him.

“Jess,” Ben said warningly, gripping Jesse’s arm with his knife hand. He had his other hand pressed against his side as though it hurt, and Claire moved closer, trying to figure if he was injured and how badly. "What is it with you and bad guys who want to snack on you?" he went on more lightly.

"I don't know," Jesse said. "I must be particularly tasty."

"Man, this is getting annoying. Good thing you’re so talented in bed." His voice was trembling a little.

“Thanks, I guess.”

Oddly enough, the one person most upset by the attention paid by the Leviathan to Jesse was Ramiel himself, who shot him an alarmed look before saying, “Oh, you don’t want him. He’s probably unpalatable. Too much demon in him—too much human.”

Too much power, Claire understood. If the Leviathan fed on Jesse he would probably become unstoppable, and that was the kind of power Ramiel couldn’t share with the creature.

Ramiel trotted up to the very edge of the lake, then started to walk into the water, raising his hands in a gesture of submission or appeasement, still talking to the Leviathan. “I’ll get you Muriel’s grace, and Castiel’s grace, and as much grace as we can share. But the cambion’s power is _nasty_.”

“Hey!” Jesse protested, and it was because Claire was busy giving him a faint smile that she missed what happened next. She only knew that water splattered and Ramiel screamed, and, when everything settled back, he was gone from the shore and there was only one of his shoes left floating on the surface.

“Did he—” Singer started, pointing his shotgun at the shoe like he expected Ramiel to spring out of it.

“Where’s the Leviathan?” Jody asked, looking everywhere but at the spot where Ramiel had disappeared. “Where’s Millie? If Ramiel was the only one to know where she was—”

The end of a tail, y-shaped like a whale’s, rose from the water and whipped at its surface. Water rained on the group and then the earth quaked, sending all of them tumbling to the ground.

_Cambion._

The word rattled Claire to the bone and she rose up on her hands and knees, but Jesse was already standing and shouting back to the Leviathan, fists clenched to his sides. “It’s me you want? Then come and get me! I’m not bloody scared of you!”

“Are you crazy?!”

Claire scrambled to her feet, feeling a pang of terror so sharp that it was like she had never felt real fear before. She rushed to him and clasped his arm, and felt Ben bump into her back, babbling questions and exclamations that echoed Claire’s sentiment: “What are you doing? Are you trying to prove something? No, don’t answer that. You—”

Jesse twisted around to face them, the three of them pressed against each other like touching as much as they could would be enough to alleviate the fear.

“I’ll distract him,” Jesse whispered hurriedly. “Please, I promise I have it under control.”

“We know you do, Jesse,” Claire said. “It’s just that—”

“That thing’s a fucking _sea monster_!” Ben finished for her.

“Thanks, I’ve noticed. I can do this. I _need_ to do this.” The urgency in his voice cut right through Claire. “I’ll draw his attention while Castiel—”

He trailed off, looking over their shoulders to where Castiel probably was standing. Claire refused to check. She felt Jesse squeeze her hand and then he was gone, leaving her cold with the absence of his body heat.

“What the ever-loving fuck is that kid doing?”

It was Dean’s voice, and Claire remembered at once that they weren’t alone. The quartet of hunters seemed not to know what to do, deprived as they were of enemies they could fight now that the demons had all run away. But Claire’s eyes were drawn to Castiel, who held the sword like he was about to launch himself into battle. The blade of the weapon shone with a light that was diffuse and ethereal like the glow of the moon. He looked battle-hungry, miles away from the family man her father had been and closer to a creature made for war.

“Cas?” Dean said.

They were all startled by a howl from the Leviathan, and, when Claire looked over to the lake, she saw the sea monster writhe and toss back and forth—and at the top of its skull was a small figure, hunched over as if it couldn’t find enough stability to stand up. Jesse looked like a fly the Leviathan could squash without a thought.

“Castiel!” Claire called, stopping him in his tracks.

He looked at her and tipped his head to the side in a gesture so reminiscent of her father that she could have cried.

“Yes,” she said. Her mouth was dry. “I say ‘yes’.”

Ben was still close enough to her to touch and she expected him to protest, to try to convince her not to do it or to extract a promise to come back. But she merely felt his fingers brush the inside of her wrist; all his attention was on Jesse fighting the Leviathan, his jaw set and lips pressed in a thin line.

“He’ll be fine,” she assured him. “We’ll take care of it.”

“I can’t lose either of you.”

“You won’t.”

Claire’s eyes met Castiel’s again.

“Everybody should shield their eyes,” he said, and then handed the sword out to Claire. It was heavier than she’d expected and she almost lost her grip on it, the tip dipping to the ground.

“Castiel.” Sam’s tense voice. “Are you really going to—”

But Claire wasn’t listening anymore, her focus entirely on Castiel. A halo appeared around his body, accompanied by the searing brilliance of his wings. The light from his halo increased progressively until all she could see was white, and she had to close her eyes before they burned in their sockets. With her eyes shut, she could feel the warmth more acutely, first as the comfort of a blanket around her shoulders, then as heat consuming her from the inside out. It was painfully familiar, something that she’d thought she would never get to feel again.

_Here_

Memories old as the beginning of time flipped in front of her eyes: a chorus of angels singing together, a bouquet of luminescence flashing with music, challenging the boundary between light and sound; the touch of God on the Garden, His presence suffusing the air and blessing it; mankind at its inception, fighting and scavenging and holding onto lives as brief as the blink of an eye with fascinating fervor.

_We_

The restriction of a vessel for the first time, making everything flatter and slower. Painful.

_Are_

Confusion and grief. _I am not your father._ Duty and purpose. _I don’t serve man, and I certainly don’t serve you._ Betrayal and loss. _Yes, I’ll always have you. Balthazar._ The memories swirled and colluded and merged, belonging to neither of them in particular and both of them interchangeably.

_Again_

Tall as the highest mountain. Vast as the widest ocean. Soaring through the air, the sky as the limit. Holding the world in the palm of a hand—what hand?—and wanting nothing more than to preserve it, even at the highest cost.

_Welcome back_

When they opened their eyes, there was the world, looking radically changed to the small part of them that was still Claire: new shadows and new sources of light, and objects that seemed to have acquired a couple of additional dimensions.

_Ready?_

The sword felt like a flash of lightening in their hand, radiant and alive.

_Yes. Let’s do this._

The world lurched to the side, and a fraction of second later they were floating high over the lake and the struggling monster. Jesse was a tiny spot clinging to the Leviathan. Then they got closer, and, where the young man Claire knew should have been they saw a human-shaped black hole, tendrils of dark smoke coiling at the edges.

_Is this how you see him all the time?_

_Yes._

_It’s not all he is._

_I know._

They landed at Jesse’s side. Without the ability to look at his face, his voice echoed in an oddly disembodied way.

“Claire?”

“We’ll take over.”

“ _Castiel?_ ”

“Thank you.” Dismissive.

“No, you don’t—Let’s work together. I can—”

“We’ll take care of it.”

“Is she in there? Can she hear me? Claire! It’s Jesse! Try to convince this butt-headed angel that I can help!”

_Castiel, let him._

_Why?_

_Why not? Are you scared of him?_

“We are not scared of anything,” said aloud.

“Then you’re an idiot!” shouted Jesse, misunderstanding the words.

The monster tried to shake them off and they fell to their knees. Jesse was sent sliding down the Leviathan’s flank, but before they could reach and try to catch him, he blinked out of sight, then reappeared standing at the top of the Leviathan’s head.

“Oh no, you don’t!” Jesse yelled, and stomped with his foot on the creature’s thick leathery skin.

It sent a schockwave that they felt to their fingertips, and the Leviathan stopped thrashing for a moment, becoming still as a huge rock.

_He’s almost as powerful as you. Maybe more, if he let himself go all the way. You_ are _scared of him._

_As well I should._

_But that’s why we have to let him help._

Before they could reach a decision, the Leviathan moved again, diving, and suddenly water crashed over them.

“Claire!”

They caught Jesse’s hand and it felt like flames were licking their fingers and searing the marrow of their human bones, trying to eat away at the core of their angelic grace. They flew away and landed back on the beach. The humans flocked over to them, all talking at the same time, pale shadows except for Dean, who shone brighter than the rest, and Sam, who oozed the same sort of darkness as Jesse, albeit with far less intensity.

“I’ll keep it still,” Jesse said, ignoring everyone. “I’ll do what I just did again, keep it subdued for a moment—and you, you get ready to strike with that sword of yours. Okay?”

“Okay,” they said.

“Cas!” Dean said forcefully, probably unhappy about being overlooked. “That thing’s thrashing around caused a few rock slides here. We have no way to get out of this beach without you or the kid. So—”

“I promise we’ll be swift.”

“We better go now,” Jesse said, scrutinizing the surface of the lake where the Leviathan had disappeared. “I’m gonna draw it out—”

“Wait!” Ben snatched Jesse by the wrist and yanked him in for a kiss. “There,” he said when he let go, sounding choked out. “Now go get 'em, tiger.”

He then turned to them, grabbing Claire’s face between his hands. “You let her go when it’s done. You hear me, you asshole?”

“I hear you.”

Jesse plunged into the lake head first, and Claire’s human heart leapt in her chest. For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen. Rain started to sprinkle, slowly dampening Claire’s clothing.

“Is he—” said Jody, but at that moment the Leviathan shot out of the water, his entire whale-like body jumping high over the water like a monstrous flying fish. It was hard to see if Jesse was anywhere on it until they heard his voice boom unnaturally loud, “ _Now!_ ”

They flew over to the monster, aiming for its head, and managed to land between its eyes. One of the Leviathan’s pupils moved to follow their arrival but the monster didn’t flail, fully under Jesse’s power for the moment. Grabbing the divine sword with both hands, they raised it over their head. The eye blinked. They drove the sword inside just as it opened again.

A roar like nothing human or animal on Earth echoed, loud enough to crack the sky. They crashed down into the lake, and, before they could let go of the sword, they were swallowed by the water.

\---

Warm. That was her first thought, and Claire clung to it and took pains elaborating on it: she was warm, and rested, and comfortable. It wasn’t the all-consuming heat of Castiel’s angelic grace that she could feel; it came from outside of her and felt like the soft, caressing warmth of sunlight on her skin.

She could hear the low murmur of water lapping against rocks—but no, wait, how was it possible? She remembered a lake; she remembered diving into its depths and then nothing. She opened her eyes.

There was indeed a river; Claire was sitting on a boulder hanging over the water, her feet a mere inch from dipping into it. Big round rocks and trees surrounded the spot where she sat and the patch of sky she could see through the trees’ foliage was a flawless powder blue. The water gleamed under the sun, and the rocks on the other side of the recess were veined in various shades of brown and orange. She was wearing a summer dress and the rock was sun-warm under her bare legs.

She knew this place. She’d spent many summers here with her parents, camping, but it had been so long ago that she had almost come to believe that she’d only dreamed it.

“Claire.”

She didn’t startle, but her entire body went taut as a drawn bow. “Dad?”

“Yes. It’s me, Claire.”

She could have sworn that, a minute ago, she had been alone on the rock, but she slowly turned her head and here he was, sitting by her side with his naked feet in the water. He wasn’t wearing Castiel’s trademark trench coat and suit, but shorts and a baby blue polo shirt, his usual vacation outfit. He looked younger than she remembered, his face more open and mobile than Castiel’s.

“Am I dreaming?” was the first thing she could think of asking.

Her father chuckled. “Ah, well, who knows. I can’t absolutely swear to you that you’re not, as I’m sometimes not sure I’m not dreaming myself.”

“If I’m not dreaming, where am I, then? You’re… dead.”

“Think about it, Claire,” he said in the exact same tone of voice he used to adopt when he was helping her with her homework and wanted her to figure it out by herself.

Once again, she looked at the water, the rocks, the trees, the blindingly blue sky. One of her most cherished childhood memories presented to her in bright Technicolor. “Heaven? Is this Heaven? It looks like—”

“It seems that Heaven looks just like the way we want it to look. Like our dearest memories.”

She nodded. It did make a certain sort of sense. This place belonged to a peaceful part of her past, a piece of paradise untainted by everything that had happened after. A time when her family had been whole and happy.

A thought struck her suddenly, trapping the breath in her throat. “Am I dead?”

“I don’t know. I’m not even sure you’re really Claire and not a figment of my imagination.”

She had been more or less avoiding looking at him but made herself do so now and found him looking back, considering. The situation was strange to the point of absurdity: here they were, after years of separation, neither of them sure that the other was real and neither daring to hope.

“Well,” she said, “the fact that I don’t look the way I did when you last saw me could be a good indication that I’m real, what do you think?”

Doubt assaulted her immediately—if she was dead and in a Heaven that looked like a place where she hadn’t been in years, maybe she had reverted to the way she had looked back then too—but her father said, “Good point,” and seemed to relax.

“I must be dead, then. I was fighting—well, Castiel was fighting, using me and—”

“Castiel.” The fierce look on her father’s face made her lose her train of thought. “I told him not to—”

“No, Dad, I wanted to—He asked me to—”

“He pretty much _has_ to ask.”

“Yes, but—” The first time she was seeing her father in years and they were fighting. This was wrong. “I’m no longer a kid to be tricked into something she doesn’t understand. There was a monster that needed to be defeated. I had to do everything in my power to help.”

And how could she not do her utmost to help when Jesse was throwing himself into the fight, in the jaws of a monster that wanted to use his powers like everyone and everything under the sun wanted to use him. Jesse—her heart ached at the thought of him—and, oh, Ben. She had assured Ben she would come back and then she had gone and got herself killed. Proved herself a liar. Ben was strong, and so was Jesse, who had endured so much already. They had each other so they would eventually, probably be fine but—the thought of being dead hadn’t bothered her too much before, but now there was something heavy and painful behind her ribs, and she had to press a fist to her chest to quiet it.

“Claire?”

She looked up; her father’s familiar expression of concern was enough to destroy the last shreds of her calm. “I missed you, Daddy,” she said, her eyes burning with unshed tears.

“I missed you too, baby,” and he wrapped her in a hug like she was still a child.

He smelled like her father, and this detail more than anything else convinced her that he was really was here with her—or rather, that she was here with him. Dead, in Heaven. She pushed him away with reluctance after a short moment, trying to wipe her eyes surreptitiously.

“There’s something that doesn’t add up,” she said, as business-like as she could despite the fact that her voice was still trembling with tears. “I was possessed by Castiel—he should have been able to heal any wound I sustained—unless I was completely obliterated, and this doesn’t match what I remember.”

They had defeated the Leviathan, she was quite sure of that, and then they had fallen into the water. It didn’t account for her being in Heaven now. Unless—

“Maybe it’s Castiel’s way to give us a moment together,” Claire said.

Her father dipped his head, but not fast enough that she couldn’t see the sadness in his eyes.

“We don’t have much time, then,” he said, his smile sweet and wistful at the same time. “Tell me about you. How old are you now? Time doesn’t pass the same way here. You look… twenty-two?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Oh. My little girl.” He smoothed a hand over her hair. “Are you working yet?”

“I’m a TA at California State Long Beach. Working on my Master’s in Religious Studies at the same time.”

He asked a few questions about her studies and she talked about it for a while, feeling like a child recounting the tale of her day at school. He kept stroking her hair and looking at her like he still wasn’t sure she was real, or like she might disappear at the drop of a hat.

“What about your private life?” He glanced down at her hands. “Not married, are you?”

“No.”

“So, is there someone special?”

“Yes…” How much did she want to tell him? This was the only moment she’d have with her dad until her life came to a natural end. “Two someones, actually.”

“Two? Do you mean—”

He gave her stomach a look that she couldn’t understand at first. “Oh no, I don’t mean that. I don’t have any children. I mean that I’m in a polyamorous relationship.” She could only interpret his reaction as a blank stare. “In a relationship with two men—a consensual relationship, you see, no infidelity on anyone’s part. They’re—Ben Braeden and Jesse Turner. Those are their names.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then, mildly: “I see.”

“You—you don’t think this is repulsive? Depraved?”

He chuckled. “Being dead has a way of making you gain perspective. Are you happy with those boys? Do you love them?”

Her heart stuttered in her chest at the question and words dried up in her mouth. She didn’t know what was so wrong with her that she had trouble even thinking it in the privacy of her mind. What was love but a word that had no power of its own, that couldn’t keep anyone to her side no matter how much she wished to? Hadn’t she loved her father? Hadn’t he loved her back?

“Claire, sweetie?” Her father brushed a wayward strand of hair off her eyes. “What is it?”

She took his hand. “I wish I could stay here with you.”

“Oh, Claire, baby—”

“But I don’t want to leave them. I couldn’t do that to them and they—they make everything feel a little bit easier.”

“Then it’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

“Yes? Yes, I guess.”

He held her tight and murmured to her ear, “I’m glad you’re happy, Claire.”

“Dad—” She was feeling something, a sort of pull that made all the hair on her body stand and her skin feel tight. “I think something’s happening.”

He held her at arm’s length to look her over. “You—you just blinked in and out of focus.”

“What?”

She looked down at her hands and got what he meant when she saw them vanish for a split second, flickering like a faulty image on a screen. She felt faint, the way she did sometimes when she’d skipped a meal or two.

“I think I’m going back. Dad, I—”

“I love you, Claire. I’m so happy I got to see you. Tell your mo—”

— _ther_. The end of the word echoed in her mind, but the rest of the sentence got lost in limbo. She couldn’t see anything anymore and it took her a moment to realize that it was because her eyes were shut. Then there was a dizzying moment when she couldn’t make sense of her position, as she’d gone from sitting up to lying flat on her back in an instant.

In Heaven she had felt nothing, almost like she had been immaterial, but now her body was waking up to her attention in the worst possible way: heavy, aching, itching, burning—even the skin on her skull hurt.

“—re? Claire?”

She couldn’t place the voice calling for her. It wasn’t her dad; it wasn’t Ben or Jesse. Therefore her incentive for answering was very low, but the voice kept gaining in urgency, so Claire struggled to move her eyelids.

“She’s waking up,” the voice said, sounding like it was talking to someone else. “Come on, Claire, open your eyes. Good girl, you’re doing good.”

At first she couldn’t see more than a composition of smudged colors, but she only had to blink a few times before she could focus and make sense of the face she was seeing: Jody Mills, smiling in relief.

“Hey,” she said. “You back with us?”

“Yeah,” Claire said. She sounded like a frog, so she cleared her throat and swallowed before talking again: “I’m fine. How long was I—”

“Just a few minutes.”

It would account for the wet ground she could feel under her. They were still at the lake. The Leviathan was dead. If she had really been in Heaven and it hadn’t been a dream, then her meeting with her father must have taken no time at all.

“Wait.” Why was Jody the one at her side? She hadn’t recognized the voice because she hadn’t expected it, she’d expected—“Where are—”

She realized she’d started sitting up when Jody held her down with a hand to her shoulder.

“Take it easy,” she said. “Your boyfriends are okay. I just asked them to give you some breathing space. They’re over there, see?”

Claire turned her head, pressing her cheek to the wet sand, and saw Ben and Jesse barely a few feet away: they were both sitting down on the ground and Jesse held Ben’s wrist, a gesture of comfort or restraint. They were looking at her with frightened eyes.

“Claire,” Ben said. He wobbled to his feet and stepped forward, shooting Jody a circumspect glance.

Claire didn’t wait for Jody to offer Ben permission and gently wriggled away from the woman’s hand to sit up. Ben fell to his knees next to her and grabbed her forearm. He was pale and haggard, and his t-shirt was wet with blood.

“Claire?” he asked, as if making sure it really was her.

“Yes, it’s me.” She extended a hand to touch the bloodstain. “Are you okay?”

“It’s not serious,” he said, his eyes searching her face.

Without warning he pulled her into a bear hug, squeezing the breath out of her. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, struggling for words.

“It’s okay,” she said, but felt frustrated because it wasn’t what she had meant to say.

“Don’t,” he said roughly against her shoulder. “Don’t try to pretend it was nothing.”

“I wasn’t trying—I love you,” she blurted out, the words rushed and awkward on her tongue. She repeated “I love you” a second time, with more confidence, and he tightened his crushing hold on her, clutching a fistful of her shirt’s fabric in his hand. She could feel the frantic thumping of his heart, out of sync with her own.

Over his shoulder, she saw Jesse move. He approached them cautiously like he was worried about intruding, making a squelching sound as he walked. He looked shockingly human now that she’d lost Castiel’s vision of him as a creature of shadows.

“Come here,” she said, holding out a hand.

He smiled and crouched to their level. There were bits of aquatic plants in his dripping hair and he smelled like a swamp. When he touched the hand she was offering, Claire felt a shock between them like static electricity and she recoiled a bit. It must have been worse for Jesse, because he yelled and jerked backward, cradling his hand against his chest.

Alarmed, Ben let go of Claire, keeping his hand in the crook of her elbow, and his body lurched toward Jesse, a magnet caught between two poles.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s fine.” Grimacing, Jesse rubbed his hand against his thigh. “It doesn’t hurt, it’s just numb. You’re burning from the inside, princess. It’s stronger than usual.”

“Oh, right.”

He had to be feeling her piece of grace, she thought, boosted from the contact it’d had with the real thing during her possession. She’d never asked him if he could feel her the way she felt his demonic nature, but it made sense that he did. She offered him a sheepish smile.

“Sorry?”

Ben looked back and forth between them, frowning. “What are you two talking about?”

“Oh, uh.” Jesse sounded absurdly guilty. “It’s just that I can usually sense Claire’s… angelic whatever. Grace, I guess. It’s a kind of numbing sensation. I don’t think it likes me too much.”

Ben looked at Claire. “I can feel him too. The demon part of him,” she said, not wanting to elaborate on the unpleasantness of the sensation. “That’s why I thought he was bad news when we met.”

“Oh, right. I remember that. It just never occurred to me—That must suck.”

“It’s not something we tried to hide from you,” Jesse said defensively. “We never even discuss it with each other. It’s just the way it is.”

“It’s kind of romantic,” Ben said in an odd voice. “Kind of Romeo and Juliet material.”

Jesse barked a laugh. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous, mate. She just told you she loved you, bask in the moment.”

“I love you too,” she said, and it was worth the weird vulnerability she felt for the bemused sound he made.

He made a move in her direction but stopped himself shy of touching. “I hope this thing isn’t permanent,” he said in a strangled voice. “That would totally piss me off.”

“It will fade away very soon.”

Her father’s voice—no, Castiel’s voice. She had associated that face with Castiel for so long that it barely even hurt to look at him, but a few moments with her dad had destroyed the illusion. He looked like Dad and yet he didn’t. He looked small and contained in this human body, with his rumpled coat and messy hair. The sword was nowhere to be seen. He was keeping his distance and she was grateful for it; she wondered if he was aware of the conversation between her and Jimmy.

She looked around her, extended her awareness beyond Ben and Jesse and Jody still kneeling by her side. Singer and the Winchesters were a little further away, conversing with each other in low voices. They looked bruised and battered but none the worse for wear, though Sam was holding onto Dean’s sleeve like his brother was a child prone to wandering. The lake looked oil-slick black, not a sign of the Leviathan anywhere, but the sky must have been clearing, because she could see a few stars twinkle at them. At the bottom of the cliff bordering the beach there was a scatter of rocks that hadn’t been there before, and Claire remembered the rock slide Dean had said the Leviathan had caused. It had stopped raining but the wind rose again, chilling her damp back.

She managed to get to her feet with minimal help. Castiel turned out to be right because, after about ten minutes, Claire and Jesse were able to bear hooking fingers with one another. Singer and the Winchesters broke off their mutterings when they saw them head their way.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked, ostensibly addressing Claire; his eyes, however, wandered past her and fixed somewhere over her shoulder.

“I’ll be fine. Angel possession, you know.”

“Like being chained to a comet, or so I’ve heard,” Dean said. Sam snorted and Claire remembered he was supposed to have been possessed by Lucifer, once. “Good job with the monster slaying.”

“I don’t know if I can claim any credit.”

“An angel and their vessel are more than the sum of their parts,” said Castiel, and Claire’s heart skipped a beat at his unexpected contribution.

She turned to look at him and something passed between them that she couldn’t put into words: an understanding, perhaps, or an agreement on where they both stood in relation to the other. The memory of acting as his vessel was now etched into the very fabric of her soul. Not that she had ever forgotten her first possession—how could she—but this time they had been so much more deeply tangled in each other. She knew, with an intimate knowledge akin to the comprehension she had of her own mind, that in his own alien way he felt guilt over the breaking of her family. Just as he probably knew that, even with everything that had happened, she’d never lost her instinctive awe of his nature, the last remnants of a faith that had been torn to shreds by being proved too real.

She was aware of other people around them, watching, probably waiting for an argument to erupt or some profound declaration to be made. Well, she wasn’t the main attraction in a freak show. She turned away without a word, and knew he understood that too.

“What’re we gonna do with the body?” Singer asked. Claire felt a surge of relief, grateful to him for bringing in more practical matters.

Sam coughed, releasing his brother’s sleeve. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel much like dredging up a monster’s massive body, dragging it to the shore, and then cutting it to pieces and burning them up. It’s bound to attract attention.”

“Then we just—leave the body in the lake for some poor unsuspecting family to find?” Ben asked, sounding dubious.

Jesse let out what sounded suspiciously like a giggle, drawing a round of puzzled looks to himself. “Sorry,” he said, covering up his eyes with a hand while visibly trying to suppress more helpless chuckles. “Just trying to picture the scene and—”

“Oookay,” said Dean, sharing a look with his brother. “I think it’s time for everybody to go home. Let the locals think whatever they want of the Leviathan’s body. It’ll make for good entertainment if nothing else.”

He patted Ben’s shoulder by way of manly goodbye and told him to get his wound looked at. Ben’s temper, naturally, flared up in response. He didn’t like Dean getting overly father-like with him—or maybe he liked it too much.

“Millie,” Claire said suddenly. She’d forgotten about her. She’d genuinely forgotten about the little girl, so caught up in her father and Castiel, in Ben and Jesse. “Oh no. Ramiel’s dead and he knew where she is—What if she’s already dead? What if—”

“Claire. Claire!” Finally, Castiel’s voice pierced through the haze of her panic. “I know where Muriel is.”

“What? How?”

“Ramiel was keeping her in a building close by—she was guarded by demons but they scampered off when the Leviathan started to get angry. As soon as she escaped, she contacted me.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

Castiel hesitated. “I was only making sure you were fine.”

“You know I’m fine. Just go!”

Jody asked to come with him, probably feeling responsible for the girl and wanting to be the one to reunite her with her siblings. Claire wanted to go too, but they didn’t need her, and something in her rebelled at the idea of getting close to Castiel—too much, too soon, and her human soul already felt much too fragile at the seams.

Jesse offered to take Singer and the Winchesters back home, and, while waiting for him, Ben and Claire sat on the shore, leaning on each other shoulder to shoulder like a couple on a romantic break. She was cold and her hair was gross, matted from the sand and lake grit. She longed for a hot shower as she had longed for little else in her life before. Ben didn’t seem to fare any better: she could feel small tremors run through his body, which made her suddenly worried about his blood loss.

“Are you still bleeding? Maybe you should—”

“Apply pressure, yeah, yeah.” A bit sluggishly, he moved to press a hand against the spot where the blood looked the freshest. He exhaled a breath and leaned more heavily against Claire. “How was it?”

She almost asked him what he was talking about, just so she could stall.

“Just the way it was before. Bright. Hot. Infinite.”

“Mm.” The sky had cleared further, and there was enough moon and starlight for Claire to see that Ben’s eyes were closing.

“Then I saw my father.”

That woke up him up a little. “What?”

“Maybe it was a dream, I don’t know. But I don’t think it was. I think Castiel allowed a little trip to Heaven so I could talk to him.”

He shifted against her shoulder. “And you came back?”

“Of course I did.” She fumbled for his hand. “I wouldn’t—”

She had exhausted all of her emotional courage and found herself looking for words. She felt Ben press his lips against her cheek. “Don’t sweat it, Claire. I got the message.”

She flushed all over from a strange mix of embarrassment, heartache, and confused arousal. “Hey, Jesse,” she said instead of a reply, and, when they turned around, sure enough, Jesse was standing behind them.

He hadn’t made a sound and Ben asked, “How did you know—You can feel him too? Like, his presence?”

“Well, yes,” Claire said a little smugly.

“And you too?” Ben asked Jesse.

“Yeah. Especially right now, what with Claire burning as hot as a little sun.”

“Now that’s a fun party trick.”

Jesse laughed and dropped down heavily on Claire’s other side. “You’ll be glad to know that everyone has made it safely back home.” He nudged Claire in the ribs. “Millie will be fine.”

“Mm.”

“She’s an angel. I’m sure a little kidnapping won’t faze her much.”

“She’s not an angel, not anymore. Neither human nor angel—something in-between.” A bit like Claire herself, only in reverse. Maybe that was why Claire felt such responsibility for her. “I meant it, you know.”

“What?”

“That I love you. Just as much as I love Ben. I know you don’t believe it.”

She heard him swallow audibly. “Yeah. Uh, okay. I—”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

His shoulders sagged in relief and she felt bad for putting him on the spot—she knew he didn’t like it. She couldn’t begrudge him his fear of feeling too much, because she was wary of similar things. She tried to imagine them in five, ten years: where would they be by then? Living all three of them in blissful domesticity? It was what a happy relationship should look like, wasn’t it? She took a deep breath. She was, truthfully, afraid of how much she felt for them, but there was one thing that didn’t scare her at all: the way they felt about each other. It was a source of comfort, her bedrock, even.

“Would you two kiss each other?”

“What’s with this new peep show kink?” Jesse said, but it was a good-natured protest and he proceeded to get on his hands and knees and crawl up to Ben at once.

Claire heard more than she saw them kiss, and something settled in her chest. It wasn’t sexual, whatever the boys might have thought. It was, she realized, akin to what she’d felt when she had been able to hug her dad after years apart. It felt like home.

It was a little while before Jesse finally took them back home.

\---

Ben had to take a couple of days off from school and work, the time needed to get back on his feet, and he slept away most of the rest of the week. Jody had updated them on how the triplets were doing: Millie seemed to be fine—although it was hard to see through her veneer of angel indifference—and the kids had been reunited with their grandparents. Claire had had one more dream from Millie where the little girl had solemnly thanked her and assured her that her capture had not been Claire’s fault. Claire wasn’t as willing to absolve herself, but it still made her feel better.

Blake and Katie showed up and fussed over Ben’s wound. Claire wasn’t exactly sure how much Ben had told them, but Katie had come out of that conversation looking at her with curiosity and awe intermingled. Maybe he’d told them the whole truth.

Come Saturday, Claire announced her intention for an impromptu visit to her mom. The boys didn’t protest; Claire, however, felt a pang of guilt at remembering her mother’s request to meet Ben. She hadn’t told them about it, but her denial of Jesse’s existence continued to weigh on her conscience.

Still, Claire left to her mother’s house, and, as expected, found her at home at that time of day.

“Is there something wrong, sweetie? You look… out of sorts.”

Claire watched her mother cook dinner, eating bits of raw carrot while leaning against the kitchen sink. Amelia had her back to Claire, her right shoulder jumping rhythmically with her chopping movement. Thok, thok, thok, went the knife against the wooden cutting plank.

“How would you know how I look, when you barely glance at me?”

Her mother’s arm stilled and her shoulders shook with a sigh. “I’m not a completely terrible mother, Claire, whatever you may think of me. I can tell.”

This uncharacteristic moment of earnestness was trumped by the fact that Amelia had yet to turn around and face her daughter. Claire wanted to test her, and the next words tumbled out of her mouth almost on accident: “I saw Castiel.”

Amelia’s back went rigid, but she didn’t say anything.

“I saw Dad, too,” Claire continued, cruel in her vagueness, and she regretted it when her mother said, “What?” in a high-pitched voice, moving as though she wanted to turn around but something was physically stopping her.

“No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put it that way. I didn’t mean—Dad died, Mom,” Claire explained, and tried to soften the blow of her words by the gentleness of her tone. Her father had wanted her to tell something to her mother. He hadn’t had the time to finish his sentence, but she felt she owed Amelia some explanation. “In Heaven—that’s where I saw him.”

Her mother let out a chuckle that contained no trace of amusement. “Heaven, really.”

“Yes. Heaven exists. You must know this—otherwise, where would angels come from? God must exist too, although I wouldn’t presume to understand where he stands in this mess.”

Her mother pivoted slowly, the heroine of a horror movie checking for the monster she could feel behind her.

“What happened to you?” she asked, in a totally different voice than when she had inquired about Claire a few minutes earlier.

Claire wanted to laugh—she had longed for her mother to ask about her, really ask in a way that showed that she wanted the answer and was able to handle it. Now that it looked like she did, Claire wasn’t sure where to start.

“Do you really want to know? Or are you going to bury your head in the sand like you usually do?”

Amelia’s fingers tightened around her kitchen knife, like she expected to have to bodily defend herself, but she held Claire’s eyes and said, “Yes. Yes, I want to know. I can see you’ve changed. What happened?”

“In the last year, a lot has happened.” She paused then, giving her mother a chance to take her question back and start chopping vegetables again. “I’ve fought angels, I’ve fought demons.” Her mother flinched at that last word. “—and ghosts, and nightmare creatures. I slew a Leviathan with a sword made by Heaven.”

Her mother was looking at her with wide, startled eyes, and Claire couldn’t tell if she managed to process what was told to her, if she believed it, but at least she wasn’t actively trying to ignore it, so Claire would count it as a victory.

“In the last year I’ve fallen in love,” she went on in a softer voice, “twice. With two different boys. You said you wanted to meet Ben, didn’t you?” Amelia nodded, shell-shocked. “Then you’ll have to meet Jesse too.”

Amelia found her voice again. “Who—”

Claire took a deep breath. The way she was going, she was about to tell her mother everything, no holds barred, but this was important, precious, and she needed to shield herself against Amelia’s possible disgust and rejection—not just of herself but also of Jesse, because telling everything meant talking about his true nature.

“It began a year ago,” she said. Better start with the beginning and maybe, if she explained everything right, Amelia would understand. “When Ben met a guy on campus. Jesse Turner. Wait, no, I think their first meeting actually took place on a bus.”

She talked, and her mother listened. Amelia's face was unreadable and she was hugging herself tightly, looking tense and vulnerable, but for the first time in years she was listening and Claire couldn't ask for much more than that. As she told her story, hers and Ben's and Jesse's, Claire relived it at the same time—the danger, the wonders, the heartache, the love. Everything that had led her to this moment. She could feel her past open into her future, wide and rolling. Unlimited. 

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this was a fun ride. This fic was sooo much harder to write than the others, maybe because it was difficult to get into Claire's mind, but I'm glad I wrote it because her POV was much needed to balance the boys'.
> 
> I'm marking this 'verse as complete because it feels like I've come to a natural stopping point - three fics, one for each character in the OT3 - but although it's unlikely I write another long fic I'm not excluding the possibility of writing timestamps or shorter stories. I have a lot of fondness for this 'verse. If you have made it that far, I hope you enjoyed the journey. :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [searching for reason](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4204641) by [ideare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ideare/pseuds/ideare)




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